MARGAREE FORKS, Nova Scotia — The Margaree Co-op Grocery, a member-owned store serving rural Cape Breton, stands as a vital hub for fresh food and community connection in an area underserved by large retailers, 

In This Article

• Why are food deserts growing in America’s biggest cities?
• What does Nova Scotia’s rural food system teach us?
• Is community ownership a form of socialism — or true capitalism?
• How can private suppliers support non-corporate grocery stores?
• What would it take for New York to try something new?

How Capitalism Can Actually Feed All People

“Socialism!” That’s the cry. The moment anyone suggests that the government do something — anything — to ensure basic human needs like food, housing, or healthcare are met, the right-wing pundits start howling. So when a recent New York mayoral candidate floated the idea of city-owned grocery stores in underserved areas, the reaction was as predictable as sunrise. Government-run stores? That’s not American! That’s not capitalism! That’s socialism with a shopping cart!

Except, it’s not. Not even close. Let’s head about 800 miles northeast to Nova Scotia, Canada, where a different story has quietly unfolded for decades. In small rural towns, far from the bright lights of Wall Street, community-owned grocery co-ops are not just surviving — they’re thriving. No government-run aisles, no commissar with a barcode scanner. Just regular people, owning their own stores, supplied by private industry. And guess what? It works.

So maybe, just maybe, there’s a lesson here. Perhaps the problem isn’t the idea of public access — maybe it’s that we’ve forgotten capitalism was supposed to serve people, not just shareholders. Let’s talk about food deserts, grocery monopolies, and why community co-ops might be the most capitalist thing left standing.

America’s Expanding Food Deserts

You can find a Starbucks on every other corner of Manhattan. But try finding a grocery store in the Bronx or East New York that sells fresh vegetables at a fair price. In city after city, entire neighborhoods — mostly low-income and predominantly Black or Latino — have become what experts call “food deserts.” Sounds benign, right? It’s not. It means people have to travel miles just to buy milk, eggs, or fruit. And if you’re poor, don’t own a car, or rely on public transportation, good luck.

But this isn’t some natural disaster. Food deserts don’t just happen. They’re the direct result of deliberate market withdrawal. Big grocery chains have spent the past two decades consolidating, cutting costs, and closing stores that fail to meet their profit margins. That often means packing up and leaving neighborhoods they deem “high-risk” or “low-yield.” Translation: if you’re not rich enough or white enough, you’re not worth the investment.

And when they leave, the vacuum is rarely filled. Small independent grocers can’t compete with the scale of Walmart or Kroger. What’s left? Bodegas, corner stores, and fast food. If your diet consists mainly of sugar, salt, and shelf-stable carbs, congratulations — you’re surviving capitalism’s nutritional wasteland and health graveyard.

This isn’t just a New York problem. Chicago has shut down multiple Walmarts and Dominick’s in recent years. Detroit’s few full-service grocers serve a city spread over 139 square miles. Even in Los Angeles, entire zip codes are better served by liquor stores than produce sections.

So what exactly is the free market freeing us from? Apparently, access to tomatoes.

Why the Market Fails Here

Let’s get something straight: the so-called “invisible hand” of the market doesn’t give a damn if you eat. It’s not cruel — it’s just indifferent. Profit, not people, drives decisions. And if a grocery store in the South Bronx or South Chicago isn’t hitting quarterly targets? Close it. No matter how many families depend on it. No matter how far people have to travel. Capitalism, we’re told, is efficient. But efficient for whom?

In a purely financial model, the math is brutal. Opening a new store in a low-income neighborhood comes with higher operating costs, tighter margins, and more perceived “risk.” Insurance is expensive. Security costs rise. Spoilage can be higher when people can’t afford bulk shopping or fresh produce. So the chains retreat — not because the need isn't there, but because the return on investment isn’t fat enough for Wall Street’s appetite.

Then there’s the consolidation problem. Grocery chains are no longer grocery chains — they’re financial assets. Hedge funds and private equity firms have swept through the industry like a plague of locusts. They don’t care about food. They care about leverage. Kroger and Albertsons? Trying to merge. Amazon? Owns Whole Foods. Dollar General? Growing faster than any grocer — but you won’t find a banana in half their stores.

This is the grotesque irony of modern capitalism: the more centralized it gets, the less responsive it becomes. It doesn’t innovate. It calcifies. And when the margins get too thin, it abandons ship. Leaving behind communities where fast food and diabetes are the last items on the shelf.

So the next time someone says “let the free market solve it,” ask them when was the last time a hedge fund opened a grocery store in a food desert. Exactly.

The Nova Scotia Model: A Real-World Working System

CHÉTICAMP, Nova Scotia — The Chéticamp Co‑op, a member-owned retail hub on Cape Breton’s Cabot Trail, offers groceries, hardware, and full-service building supplies with competitive pricing and free delivery. Founded in 1937, the co‑op operates as a private-sector partnership serving over 2,700 residents, proving that community ownership can deliver both value and independence.

Now, let’s take a look north, not to some imaginary utopia, but to Nova Scotia. In this rugged, rural province, big-box grocery stores don’t even bother with half the map. You’d think that would leave communities stranded. But here’s the surprise: they didn’t wait for Walmart to show up. They built something better.

In dozens of small towns across Nova Scotia, grocery stores are owned by the people who shop in them. These are not government programs or socialist collectives. They’re co-ops — real businesses, operating in the private market, competing on price, quality, and service. The difference is that instead of sending profits to distant shareholders or Wall Street banks, the value stays within the community.

These co-ops don’t grow all their own food. They’re not isolationist experiments. They work with private suppliers — the same ones that stock corporate stores. Nova Scotia’s long-standing wholesaler, Co-op Atlantic, once supplied hundreds of community stores with everything from canned soup to fresh produce. Today, while Co-op Atlantic has faded, the legacy lives on. Many co-ops now source through private distributors or regional networks, maintaining connections to mainstream supply chains while avoiding corporate ownership.

It’s capitalism — with accountability. The profit motive still exists, but it’s grounded in service, not extraction. These stores have to compete, adapt, and earn loyalty. But because the customers are also the owners, decisions are made with more than next quarter’s earnings in mind. They think long-term. They think local.

Need new refrigeration? Members vote. Would you like to expand your hours or incorporate more local produce? The board, elected from the community, makes the call. No distant CEO, no profit-maximizing algorithm. Just neighbors solving problems for themselves.

And this isn’t charity. These co-ops are sustainable businesses. In many towns, they’re the only grocery option left — not because they were subsidized into existence, but because they fill a market gap the big guys ignored. You want resilience? This is what it looks like.

So when critics sneer at community ownership and shout “socialism,” maybe point them toward Nova Scotia. What they’ll find isn’t a workers’ commune — it’s a model of self-sufficient capitalism that just happens to feed people.

What’s Already Working in the U.S.

Let’s not pretend co-ops are a Canadian quirk. The United States has a long — if often overlooked — tradition of cooperative enterprise, including in food access. It's just that in today’s political environment, anything community-owned sounds suspiciously like socialism to folks who think profit is the only measure of success.

Take People’s Food Co-op in La Crosse, Wisconsin. It started in a church basement and grew into a full-service grocery store — rooted in local values, funded by local members. It competes not by undercutting prices, but by overdelivering trust. In Minnesota, co-ops like Mississippi Market and Seward Community Co-op serve tens of thousands of urban residents — many of them in historically underinvested neighborhoods.

In Detroit, the long-planned Detroit People’s Food Co-op has been inching toward completion, despite delays and funding hurdles that underscore just how hard it is to build outside the corporate box. Still, it's a powerful symbol: a Black-led, community-owned grocery in a city where big chains fled decades ago. That’s resilience — not a business plan, but a lifeline.

Even in New York City, you’ll find signs of cooperative principles — not in the flashy parts of Manhattan, but in projects like the Park Slope Food Coop, which has over 17,000 members and runs on shared labor and democratic decision-making. And while Co-op City in the Bronx is best known as a housing cooperative, its existence is proof that cooperative models can scale — even in dense urban environments. The attached retail, though not run as a food co-op, reflects the power of local control over essential services.

Let’s also clear up a myth. Dollar General often cited as a grocery substitute in rural America isn’t a grocer. It’s a convenience chain with a business model based on selling shelf-stable goods at low overhead. That’s why they rarely stock fresh produce. They’re filling a void, yes — but they’re not solving the problem. They’re just redefining survival.

Meanwhile, mega-mergers like Kroger-Albertsons keep trying to consolidate grocery power, though regulators finally stepped in and blocked the latest attempt in late 2024. That tells us something: even the federal government is starting to see the danger in treating food access like a monopoly game.

But let’s be honest: community willpower alone isn’t enough to build these systems from scratch. That’s where government must come in — not to run the show, but to level the playing field. Start-up capital, zoning support, access to distribution — these are areas where smart public investment can catalyze long-term private ownership. In other words, give people the tools, and they'll build their own lifeboat. Just stop throwing them anchor chains and calling it aid.

The real solution? Local ownership. Community capital. Private supply chains — yes — but controlled by the people they serve. That’s not a fantasy. It’s already happening, just not loudly enough to make the news.

How New York and Other Cities Could Apply the Model

So what does this have to do with New York? Everything. Because if there’s any place that needs to break the corporate grip on basic survival, it’s a city where Whole Foods shows up in Chelsea but vanishes from the Bronx. Where bodega chips outnumber fresh vegetables 10-to-1. Where the free market has drawn a food map that might as well be a segregation plan.

Earlier this year, a progressive mayoral candidate floated the idea of government-run grocery stores in food deserts. Cue the hysteria. Conservative media had a field day, labeling it Venezuela-on-the-Hudson. But they missed the point — or pretended to. This wasn’t about turning the Department of Sanitation into Safeway. It was about providing food security where the private sector has failed.

But there’s a smarter, less polarizing option: community co-ops, backed with public seed funding and logistical support, but owned and operated by locals. Not a public bureaucracy. Not a corporate chain. Something in between — flexible, responsive, and grounded in community needs.

Want to revitalize a vacant commercial building in Flatbush? Organize a co-op, pool capital from members, secure supplier contracts, and let the city match infrastructure costs. Boom — jobs, food access, and local investment in one shot. Want to keep prices low without begging Walmart to care? Utilize group purchasing power, as Nova Scotia’s co-ops have done. Tap into regional distributors. Support local farmers' markets as feeder systems. The know-how exists. What’s missing is the political courage.

This isn’t about ideology — it’s about function. Let communities do what Wall Street won’t. Give them the tools. Remove the barriers. Stand back. And don’t call it socialism when it works.

Because if New York can prove that co-ops work in dense urban environments — not just rural Canada — the ripple effect could hit every city where the nearest salad is an Uber ride away. From Detroit to Dallas, from Oakland to Appalachia, the model scales across the nation. All it takes is someone to break the monopoly of ideas as well as supply chains.

Rebuilding Trust, Local Ownership, and Resilience

At the end of the day, this isn’t just about groceries. It’s about dignity. It’s about whether a society values its people enough to ensure they can meet their most basic needs without relying on charity or succumbing to corporate neglect. It’s about power — who has it, who doesn’t, and how we might begin to reclaim it, one neighborhood at a time.

Community-owned co-ops aren’t some silver bullet. They won’t solve every problem. But they build trust — something that’s been decimated by decades of top-down management, broken promises, and disappearing institutions. When people have a stake — when they see their input change what’s on the shelves, when they vote for their board, when they know the profits go back into the town and not a hedge fund — something shifts. Cynicism gives way to ownership. Passive frustration gives way to active resilience.

That’s the secret we’ve forgotten in all our economic forecasting and policy debate: People care for what they help build. The co-op model is proof. It's not idealistic. It's not theoretical. It's not waiting for a better system to fall from the sky. It’s already working — in Nova Scotia, in pockets of the U.S., in rural towns and immigrant communities. What’s needed now is the will to expand it, support it, and defend it from those who fear the redistribution of power more than they fear hunger.

If New York wants to be a leader again — not just in finance or fashion, but in real social infrastructure — this is the blueprint. Let people feed themselves on their own terms, in their own neighborhoods, with support but not control. Let co-ops rise where capitalism has retreated. Let ownership return to those who live with the consequences.

And to those who say it can’t be done? Tell them to look north. Or better yet, tell them to move out of the way.

About the Author

Robert Jennings is the co-publisher of InnerSelf.com, a platform dedicated to empowering individuals and fostering a more connected, equitable world. A veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Army, Robert draws on his diverse life experiences, from working in real estate and construction to building InnerSelf with his wife, Marie T. Russell, to bring a practical, grounded perspective to life’s challenges. Founded in 1996, InnerSelf.com shares insights to help people make informed, meaningful choices for themselves and the planet. More than 30 years later, InnerSelf continues to inspire clarity and empowerment.

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This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License. Attribute the author Robert Jennings, InnerSelf.com. Link back to the article This article originally appeared on InnerSelf.com

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Article Recap

Food co-ops in Nova Scotia offer a working model of private-sector-driven, community-owned capitalism that serves people where traditional markets have failed. As food deserts grow in American cities, this approach could provide a scalable alternative — not socialism, but accountable capitalism rooted in trust and local control.

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