The Carrot is Eastside Food Co-op’s quarterly newsletter. It’s your guide to every season at the co-op! Find new products, inspiration, recipes, and community culture. Connect with your co-op.
Though often disparaged as simple bird food, millet has been cultivated and eaten by humans for thousands of years. Probably because it is one of the most nutritious grains you can eat.
Fill your grocery bag with autumnal delights; from crisp apples to comforting ghee, there are plenty to enjoy. Take a peak into our bag and discover some of our favorites!
Conventional wisdom has it that Minnesota was largely settled by Scandinavian and German immigrants. . .
Way back at the beginning of the long history of Eastside Food Co-op, years prior to opening an actual store, organizers and board members had a dual challenge before them: raising awareness of the coming store and soliciting new owners.
Spend any amount of time talking with Patty Grell of Dutch Bar and you’ll walk away from the conversation knowing one thing for certain- she loves Northeast.
John Lacaria is an avid cyclist, proud dad and loving husband, board game player, and a teller of terrible “dad jokes”. Up until recently, he was also the General Manager of Eastside Food Co-op.
Marty’s Deli occupies a busy and charming corner of Northeast Minneapolis. Located on the intersection of Lowry and 4th, Marty’s Deli was founded in 2022 by Martha (Marty) Polacek.
Buying organic feels virtuous - and that's the point. The word "organic" carries weight in the marketplace because it communicates a vision of agricultural virtue. An organic vegetable or dairy product, we might imagine, represents a farm that is renewing the soil, treating its workers fairly, and raising its animals with love and respect. The letter of the law, however, sees it differently, and increasingly large corporate entities have been using the organic label as a way to sell agricultural products that would turn the stomachs of consumers were they able to see behind the scenes.
Yasameen Sajady grew up as the daughter of Afghan immigrant parents who had a robust love for and talent with food. And a good thing, too. “When my parents came here in the 1970s, all of their siblings came too,” she said. “They have nine or 10 brothers and sisters. So I have 55 cousins. Every weekend would be a get-together, and it would be all about the cooking. Who brings the best rice? What are the sides? Where’s the naan coming from? How fresh is it going to be?”
It’s easy to go a year (or more!) without thinking about mushrooms as anything other than a highly optional pizza ingredient. But the fact that there is an entire sprawling kingdom of lifeforms sharing our planet - offering sustenance, wiping out under-cautious foragers, breaking down biological material, even serving as material for hats - is magical and dazzling when you put a bit of thought into it.
In college, I dated a guy who was appalled that I had never tried tofu. Determined to rectify the situation, he invited me over to his house and made me a tofu and vegetable stir fry with peanut sauced-noodles. I fell in love with both tofu and my now-husband, and nearly 15 years later, tofu remains a standby in our weekly meal plan.
Dale Flattum is the artist behind the incredible visuals for ALL TOGETHER NOW!: Eastside Food Co-op During Art-a-Whirl.
As with many great ideas throughout history, it all started in a bathroom. In 1996, long before the brewery scene, the bustling restaurants, and the big crowds, a small group of artists gathered in the Thorp Building at David and Lois Zabel Felker’s International Gallery of Contemporary Art to plan out an art crawl. The downtown Warehouse District scene was drying up, and artists had begun settling into cheap studio spaces in the abandoned factories in Northeast, creating a fledgling creative community in search of an audience.
I take a sip of the coffee that Folly Coffee co-founder Rob Bathe has put in front of me and pause to gather my disordered thoughts. The coffee is the first in Folly's Experimental Series, and it's a tornado of inputs that doesn't really clearly resolve into "coffee" as I know it. Blindfold me, and the complex lavender / floral / spice notes would let you lie me into thinking I'm drinking blended black tea, or even a rare beer.
Inspired by a song by Canadian punk band Propagandhi (which was itself inspired by an escapee pig in the city of Red Deer in 1990), Francis is NE Minneapolis’ first vegan burger bar.
Of the many hundreds of staffers, board members, and volunteers that have come together to keep Eastside growing and thriving over the past 2+ decades, there’s one such person who we think deserves a little time in the limelight. We are talking about Eastside’s first General Manager, Amy Fields.
We are proud to feature lots of products by women-owned businesses here at Eastside. Read about them here:
Levittown on Long Island in New York State is regarded as America’s first modern planned suburb. Built to accommodate returning World War II veterans, Levittown opened its doors on October 1, 1947. When complete, Levittown had 17,447 homes with a population of over 50,000. Levittown became the posterchild of the postwar USA and was featured proudly and prominently in all the mainstream magazines such as Life, Look, and Fortune. To many among a war-weary public, Levittown exuded everything associated with living the American Dream. There was, however one American element nowhere to be found in any of the 17,447 homes in Levittown—a Black family.