You may have heard that I’m retiring — not shy and retiring, just retiring. It’s all true.

It’s been an honor (fun, too . . . usually) to edit the Shuttle, the paper of record for Weavers Way. I’m grateful to the cooperators who stepped up to cover important meetings (sometimes under pseudonyms). I’m also thankful for the dozens of writers who covered other subjects — sometimes because the subjects interested them but often because they interested ME. Not to mention the photographers (I may have mentioned that I take awful pictures). And a special shout-out to my kindred spirits, the proofreaders who fretted and fumed about grammar, spelling and usage. Bless you.

Thanks to Glenn Bergman for hiring me and Norman Weiss for getting used to me, but I couldn’t have done it without writer and woman-about-the-Co-op Karen Plourde; web guy Paul Weinstein; Membership Manager Kirsten Bernal and Outreach Coordinator Bettina de Caumette, who despite being stuck in the basement, together know everyone and everything; and above all, Art Director Annette Aloe, whose specialty is making the paper great again once I’m done with it.

Reading through old Shuttles, I’m also gratified to see that I’ve been consistent about a few things over the past nearly six years:

• GMOs: It’s not that I’m persuaded they’re unhealthful per se. It’s that Big Ag makes me sick. Let me know when GMOs achieve something other than enriching the shareholders of Monsanto, now Bayer.
• Solid waste and plastic pollution: Just put down the bottled water.
• The local food conundrum: In my introductory column, I said my favorites are the “A” vegetables — artichokes, asparagus and avocados. There’s the conundrum in a nutshell. Artichokes come from far, far away, and bringing avocados back from California in my carry-on (“My Vacation Is Their Local”) doesn’t exactly address the problem. Driving around Lancaster County looking for asparagus won’t win me any carbon-footprint-reduction prizes.

If I may have a Last Word, it’s this: First World foodies cannot just think local. We have to keep paying top dollar for organic and justly traded products grown in the tropics — coffee, chocolate, bananas, to name the biggies — and keep the pressure on to improve farmers’ lives in the Third World. Because we’re the ones who can afford it.

To steal Jon Roesser’s signoff, see you around the Co-op.