Lori Zuidema in a Cheese Rustlers truck in the 1970s.
This post is part of a series related to the documentary I am producing: Radical Roots: The Story of a Food Revolution. We have two weeks left to make our fundraising goal at Seed & Spark.
One advantage of the non-professional and non-hierarchical nature of the early natural food co-ops was that young women were able to gain skills and practice leadership in ways that may have not been open to them at the time in other, more conventional settings. In this interview for Radical Roots, we talk about this to Lori Zuidema and Eve MacLeish, former members of The Cheese Rustlers, a collective of women who distributed cheese to co-ops.
In honor of their groundbreaking work, and because they had an awesome logo, we are offering Cheese Rustlers t-shirts to everyone who donates $100 or more to Radical Roots.
Lori is now a manager at Co-op Partners Warehouse, the distributor that is part of The Wedge Co-op, which serves co-ops throughout the Upper Midwest (Co-op Partners also houses the Minnesota warehouse of Equal Exchange, source of the great coffee and chocolate you can get when you donate to Radical Roots).
Eve was a long-time Riverside Cafe collective member before joining the Cheese Rustlers, and now can be heard co-hosting Corazon Latino on KFAI, Twin Cities community radio, on Tuesdays at noon.
Please help us tell this important story by donating at Seed & Spark, following us on Facebook, and Twitter.