This year, I’ve decided to run a series of short interviews with some of the marvelous people I know or have worked with (or both), because I know far too many fascinating people not to share. Each person answers the same questions. All of them give thought-provoking, interesting, wonderful answers.

These are the people you’re sitting next to at this dinner party. Enjoy.

Gordon Edgar loves cheese and worker-owned co-ops, and has been combining both of these infatuations as a cheesemonger at Rainbow Grocery Cooperative in San Francisco for since 1994. Edgar has been a judge at cheese competitions, a board member for the California Artisan Cheese Guild, and has had a blog since 2002, which can be found at www.gordonzola.net. His cheese memoir, Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge was published in 2010 by Chelsea Green. 

Please describe yourself in 25 words or less. 

A cheese-obsessed, punk rock-reared Californian who has an awesome white schnauzer that is smarter than me. I am currently working on a book about Cheddar.

What are three things about you that most people either don’t know or wouldn’t expect?

I have 2 Junior National Gold medals for a sport I haven’t participated in since 1985.

I work at a place where everyone starts at the same wage and pay is not related to job.

I still work my day job full time even though I wrote a book. (Please note: other writers are not surprised by this, but everyone else seems to be.)

Of the things you’ve done in your life so far, what are you proudest of?

I’d have to say finishing Cheesemonger and getting it published. While it’s something of a collection of my thoughts, observations and anecdotes on my years working in cheese, thinking I could turn it into a publishable book was definitely a leap of faith. I decided early on – since my track record as a writer was not large – that I would write the whole thing before trying to sell it, which is not the way that non-fiction usually works. I was working full time as a cheesemonger when I wrote it (and still am now, by the way) and there were a lot of times I could have just said, “Forget this, it’s taking all my free time. This is too much!” but I just needed to get it done — even if it cost me some friends because I cut out most of my social life to do it.

It didn’t make me rich and famous but I feel like I did the topic justice. It’s funny, it talks about food politics, and I think it demystifies cheese, but I also like to think of it as a book about service retail disguised as a book about cheese.  It’s all of those things, but there is a delicate aspect to writing honestly, using my real name, about a job where you work behind a counter helping customers all day. That I work in a co-op allows me to write about the experience of work and not get fired, so I feel like it’s my responsibility to represent what the work is like. Grocery work is becoming less unionized (thanks natural foods industry!) so cheese workers, generally speaking, are selling fancier and fancier cheese and getting paid less and less. The book seems like it’s becoming a cheese-community cult classic, which makes me super happy.  I hear from folks all over the country who work behind cheese counters.

The other thing, which comes pretty close, is to help found the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives in 2004. Our co-op volunteered to facilitate all the big meetings at the founding conference and we managed to pull it off. I facilitated the introductory meeting of a couple hundred people, most of whom had never met each other. I think it set the tone for an incredibly positive weekend where we formed the first national member organization for people who practice workplace democracy. Anyone who’s ever been to a big gathering like that knows how easily it can go off the rails.  This easily could have been the worst memory of my political life.  Instead, we started something that will hopefully live on for decades into the future.

What’s an as yet nonexistent thing about which you’ve thought “why hasn’t someone created that yet?”

Well, I am not much for this kind of question.  I’m more of an in-the-moment kind of person.  But I would really like it if someone could invent a real-time human/dog translation machine for my schnauzer.

If you could get everyone who reads this to do one thing, just once, what would you get them to do?

To try and feel empathy for their political opponents.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying don’t fight or that you have to forgive people who have done you wrong.  I just truly believe that there is no good political action or community building that happens without empathy.

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Hey!  Do you like cheese?  How about other kinds of food?  Why not subscribe to my new project, A Girl’s Gotta Eat?  

A Girl’s Gotta Eat is a cookbook for people who like to read, and food writing for people who like to eat, in the form of a 13-month serial… check it out!  It’s almost at 25% funded, and if I make 50% by May 1, I’m going to share my Top Sekrit recipe for my thin, melt-in-your-mouth lemon sable cookies with everyone who’s helped fund it that far.