Editorial Team
Publication Date
February 23, 2024
Yerimar Rivera Rivera, GPJ Puerto Rico
Customers peruse food and select products at Súper Solidario Coop, an alternative to traditional food banks in Puerto Rico.
CAGUAS, PUERTO RICO — The day is just beginning to heat up as dozens of people, most of them elderly, calmly and quietly arrange themselves into a line outside of Centro de Apoyo Mutuo, an initiative for self-managed food distribution. Carmen Lydia Texidor, smiling tenderly and exuding friendliness, prepares an attendance list and organizes the numbers she will hand out to the waiting clientele. When the clock strikes 9 a.m., the doors of what used to be an abandoned building open, welcoming people to Súper Solidario Coop, an alternative to Puerto Rico’s traditional food banks.
Its shelves and tables display fruit, root vegetables and other produce harvested by local farmers. The scents of papaya, banana and watermelon waft in the air. The orange of the pumpkins and deep purple of the eggplants gleam and pop next to fresh eggs from Puerto Rican farms. Other surfaces are replete with canned goods, sauces, coffee, oil, honey, corn flour, rice and other carbohydrates. And there is no shortage of basic condiments like salt, cinnamon and adobo, a mix of salt, garlic, black pepper and turmeric. They are essential to the Puerto Rican diet.
This solidarity supermarket was founded in 2020 and operates in two ways. The first is a program that allows those who live below the poverty line to choose food with dignity at no charge, rather than receiving boxes filled with nonperishable goods, a common occurrence at traditional food banks, where the ability to choose is a rarity. The second offers lower and fairer prices to the general public in the midst of Puerto Rico’s economic crisis and growing inflation.
The initiative was born in Caguas, within Centro de Apoyo Mutuo, known as CAM, which began operating in the city center just days after Hurricane Maria hit the archipelago in 2017. At that time, a group of young people who had gained experience at Comedores Sociales de Puerto Rico, a nonprofit that’s been working to eradicate hunger since 2013, distributed hot meals to people in the community.
Over time, they have launched multiple initiatives to strengthen “food sovereignty,” like delivering provisions door to door or by neighborhood during the coronavirus pandemic. “That led us to have an impact on over 26,000 people between April and September in 2020,” says Marisel Robles, one of CAM’s original organizers.
“For us, it is important to speak about food sovereignty instead of hunger or food insecurity,” says Paola Aponte, an organizer at both CAM and the solidarity supermarket. She highlights the importance of involving the community in a process that targets the cause of the problem in the archipelago, not just its consequences.
Aponte says they stay cognizant of nutritional values, “in addition to introducing some foods that maybe people don’t know about, like quinoa, so they learn how to have a healthier diet.”
In December 2022, CAM, which is run on a cooperative model, obtained the property deed to an abandoned building on the city center of Caguas. It was rescued and placed at the service of people’s needs. This helped them to bolster their social project, where the organization serves about 300 families a month through the solidarity supermarket and other food-based initiatives.
Among the supermarket’s unique features is a solidarity shelf. From it, people can select a maximum of 10 edible items and two medicines to take home either at no cost or in exchange for a donation of their choice.
Customers can also volunteer in exchange for goods, including over-the-counter health and hygiene products.
“I had this idea for a long time: providing help, especially to the elderly,” says Diego Díaz, a young local resident who started the solidarity supermarket’s health shelf initiative.
Díaz manages a collection of donated items like bandages, alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, medication for joint pain and inflammation, and even walkers and canes, among many others, as well as their distribution at Súper Solidario Coop, which operates on the last Saturday of every month.
The solidarity supermarket also offers both fresh and warehouse goods at lower prices than what is offered in the area to local residents and people from other municipalities thanks to donations from local businesses.
These contributions allow the supermarket to keep costs low in comparison with other area supermarkets. Case in point: Pumpkins can be purchased for 34 United States cents per pound, compared to 79 cents per pound elsewhere. Another example: Brown sugar is 18% cheaper. Pink beans and cilantro are for sale at prices roughly 28% lower, and carrots cost 41% less, according to a comparison conducted by Global Press Journal between Súper Solidario Coop and a chain supermarket in the same area.
Collections and donations, plus profits, sustain the supermarket, and federal and state funding – obtained as a social project – helps it cover administrative expenses.
Súper Solidario Coop lives and dies by the work of its volunteers. The space it occupies is in a state of constant change and improvement. It recently acquired refrigerators to offer a wider variety of traditional meals and products: Puerto Rican pasteles, a pork stuffing encased in a green plantain masa and wrapped in banana leaves; alcapurrias, long fritters made with taro or plantains and stuffed with ground meat; and their famous lenturrias, round fritters with a lentil-and-grain base. The supermarket sells them by the dozen and half-dozen.
María García and her daughter, Nerimari de Jesús García, are beneficiaries of the solidarity supermarket. Smiling as they pay for their items, they say they love visiting the space. “Excellent. Everything is excellent here,” they say in unison, about both the products and service.
“The benefit we receive is satisfying the people,” says Texidor, who both volunteers at and benefits from the solidarity supermarket. She points out the importance of having a system that allows people to select products they truly like in an accessible way in lieu of passively accepting product-filled boxes, as occurs in food banks.
Another volunteer-led CAM project addresses hunger by delivering free groceries to Caguas’ families once a month. CAM selects the families based on parameters that calculate a family’s need for food using a series of questions such as, “When was the last time you ate?” The volunteers administer these questionnaires as well.
Sebastián Díaz, a local farmer who supplies the initiative with a variety of goods, thinks the solidarity supermarket’s model is disrupting traditional consumerism, in which people go to a location solely to make purchases. Here, “they are building a community with their activities, and the space is turning into a meeting place,” Díaz says.
CAM also offers talks on health, diet, agriculture and mutual support. It also provides lunch for just 5 dollars and occasionally for free. Volunteers prepare and serve these meals on the days the solidarity supermarket is open. “This diversity of activities turns the Súper Solidario space into much more than a traditional market,” Díaz says.
John Corales, regional director of the Puerto Rico Department of Family for the Caguas region, says, “The region’s poverty and hunger levels are not the most alarming in Puerto Rico.” The department administers the Programa de Asistencia Nutricional (PAN), a nutrition assistance program that “helps those on the island who are living below the poverty line” so they can afford a basic diet.
All around Puerto Rico, the program serves 752,104 families. Corales says, “PAN is available to and in use by approximately 27,000 families and individuals” in Caguas, a municipality with a population of 127,244 people, according to the most recent United States census.
Nahiomy Rodríguez Torres says that her main motivation for shopping here is the affordable prices. “I know I can find local products at prices I can pay without it being too painful,” she says, wishing that more people were able to bring a meal that they chose themselves to their tables. “It’s something I’d like to see replicated throughout all of Puerto Rico.”
Yerimar Rivera Rivera is a Global Press Journal assistant reporter based in Puerto Rico.
TRANSLATION NOTE
Shannon Kirby, GPJ, translated this story from Spanish.
