SELMA MIRIAM, a founder of the feminist, collective, vegetarian restaurant, Bloodroot, was born on this date (d: 2/06/2025) in the Bronx and grew up in Bridgeport, CT.  She was the only child of of Faye and Elias Davidson who owned a fabric store on Main Street in Bridgeport. 

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Jackson College in 1956 which was then the woemn’s college at Tufts University, where she majored in biology and psychology. She always maintained that the best thing she learned at college. however, was how to knit continental style.

She was also a talented and adventurous cook, and began having dinners in her home for which she charged $8 for a weekly buffet of luxurious vegetarian meals, eschewing cuisines that contributed to the suffering of animals.

In 1977, along with her friend Noel Luriel, she opened Bloodroot as a feminist restaurant abd bookstore. “We son’t just want a piece of the pie,” she declared in “A Culinary Uprising: the Story of Bloodroot”, a 2024 documentary ” we want a whole new recipe.” “Bloodroot,” another documentary, came out in 2019.

Bloodroot was initially run as a cooperative. Early members eventually moved on and Miriam and Ms Furie carried on. An avid gardener, she names the restaurant after a native plant tje flowers in the spring and spreads through an underground root system and forms colonies of new flowers.

Miriam herself was as full of life as her namesake restaurant. The week that she opened Bloodroot, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and given three years to live. She refused the radical mastectomy that her doctor was offering because she didn’t want to miss work. “I was the only one who could cook,” she insisted.

Selma Miriam died at age 89 (just three weeks shy of her 90th birthday) of pneumonia and is survived by her lifetime partner,  Carolanne Curry.