Review of ''Grocery Activism. The Radical History of Food Cooperatives in Minnesota''

Abstract

Reviewer: Ion Bogdan Vasi, University of Iowa, USA Many people are familiar with the adage “tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are” and its abbreviated version “you are what you eat”. Many people are also familiar with the “Certified Organic” logo that is visibly displayed on many products in grocery stores nowadays. Yet, as Upright reminds us in “Grocery activism. The Radical History of Food Cooperatives in Minnesota”, the concept of “organic food” was practically unknown before the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, Upright argues that the “organic food movement” eventually became the organic food industry, an industry that has been growing during the last decades and reached over 50 billion $US in 2019. At the core of this industry are cooperative grocery stores, which created the infrastructure that allowed the organic food industry to develop nationwide. In this book,...