History of Food Cooperatives | The Noah Project

Video premiere on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Craig Upright will join East Side Freedom Library’s Peter Rachleff in conversation on Thursday, June 4 at 7:00 p.m. for the launch of his new book, Grocery Activism: The Radical History of Food Cooperatives in Minnesota. The event is part of the Ramsey County Historical Society’s History Revealed series and can be accessed from the ESFL Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/EastSideFreedomLibrary/.

Grocery Activism looks back to the 1970s, when the mission of cooperative grocery stores shifted from political activism to the promotion of natural and organic foods. The story of the fraught relationship of these new-wave organizations to the organic food industry, it is an instructive case study in the history of activists intervening in capitalist markets to promote social change.

“Grocery Activism fills a gaping hole in the literature on food activism, and it’s one that my students often ask about: the radical origins of food cooperatives. Readers shocked by Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods may well feel nostalgic for the cramped spaces and dusty bins of the 1970s food cooperatives that are the focus of this book.” —Julie Guthman, author of Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California

“In the 1970s, the organic food movement needed to reach consumers, and food co-ops needed a reason to exist. Grasping the relationship between a social movement and an organizational form is not easy, but Grocery Activism achieves its aims in a clear, informative way. This book will interest anyone who wants to understand how local action can produce new and unexpected forms of market structure.” —Kieran Healy, Duke University

Read more about the book here: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-divi…/books/grocery-activism.