For fifteen years the good people of Bethlehem have been building a grocery store that everyone adores and no one can open. It has swallowed three million public dollars, a mayor’s vanity, a decade of promises, and one very expensive refrigeration unit. It has never sold a pepper. First in a series.
Every doomed enterprise has its founding myth, and the Bethlehem Food Co-op has one of the loveliest. It begins, the faithful will tell you, with a pepper. Someone, somewhere in Bethlehem circa 2011, went looking for a decent red bell pepper, could not find one worthy of the name, and decided that the only sensible response to this indignity was to build an entire grocery store the community would own itself. From a red bell pepper to a community hub, the website purrs. It is the kind of origin story that plays beautifully at an academic’s or ex-hippie’s house party, and there have been many house parties.…