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New Harvest Moon Co-Op Has a Shine for Its Community

The story of how the newest Twin Cities area co-op came into existence is a testament to the power of community.

First, a commitment to community sparked the idea more than five years ago.

“I grew up in a small town,” explained Kari Pastir-Smith, one of the founders of Harvest Moon, in Long Lake, Minnesota, and now its marketing chief. Last week, she sat down with me, a Harvest Moon member, and Peter Doolan, Harvest Moon’s general manager, in the new store’s cheery, sunlit deli. “I saw Long Lake as a small town, too,” she continued, “except that it didn’t have a grocery store, and it didn’t have a gathering place to bring the community together in a cohesive way. With Harvest Moon, we now have both.”

For a while, though, there were doubts about whether they could actually pull it off.

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Pure Market Express Offers Raw Food to Go

Quentin and Rebecca IreyQuentin and Rebecca Irey"We want to change people's lives," Quentin Irey tells me, "we want to bring raw food to the masses." I'm trying to listen while eating a plate of food on which nothing is what it sounds like. Quentin and his wife Rebecca, the Twin Cities entrepreneurs who recently founded Pure Market Express, have just served me samples of four raw foods, and they won't say any more until I've tried what they're calling a bacon jalapeno popper. What concerns me is that the "bacon" they're serving is made from eggplant, and the "cheese" is a mixture of pine nuts, chives, lemon juice, salt and pepper.

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