Subtitle: Food Co-ops and the Counterculture
Author: Craig Cox
Subject: Sociology
Paper ISBN 0-8135-2102-5
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2101-7
Pages: 170 pp.
Series: Perspectives on the Sixties series

In the 1960s, the cooperative networks of food stores, restaurants, bakeries, bookstores, and housing alternatives were part counterculture, part social experiment, part economic utopia, and part revolutionary political statement. The co-ops gave activists a place where they could both express themselves and accomplish at least some small-scale changes. But these activists could not always agree among themselves on their goals.

Craig Cox, a journalist who was active in the co-op movement, here provides the first book to look at food co-ops during the 1960s and 1970s. He presents a dramatic story of hope and conflict within the Minneapolis network, one of the largest co-op structures in the country. His "view from the front" of the "Co-op War" that ensued between those who wanted personal liberation through the movement and those who wanted a working-class revolution challenges us to re-think possibilities for social and political change.

Craig Cox is editor of Business Ethics, a national bimonthly magazine that covers socially responsible business. He has written for a variety of local, regional, and national publications.