Good Food is Everybody's Business
Dirt, soil, call it what you want – it’s everywhere we go. It is the root of our existence, supporting our feet, our farms, our cities. This fascinating yet disquieting book finds, however, that we are running out of dirt, and it’s no laughing matter.
The Soil and Health was published in 1945, just before agricultural corporations surged to global proportions. Sir Albert Howard’s work is a major inspiration to the growing organic and sustainable farming movement and a thought-provoking reminder of a road not taken in developing mainstream agriculture during the past half-century.
What in American society has changed so dramatically that nearly 60 percent of us are now overweight, plunging the nation into what the surgeon general calls an “epidemic of obesity”? Greg Critser engages every aspect of American life – class, politics, culture, and economics – to show how we have made ourselves the second fattest people on the planet (after South Sea Islanders).
For Going Green, Pritchett has gathered over twenty writers to tell their personal stories of Dumpster diving, eating road kill, salvaging plastic from the beach, and forgoing another trip to the mall for the thrill of bargain hunting at yard sales and flea markets.
For decades, Wes Jackson has taken it upon himself to speak for the grasses and the land of the prairie, to speak for the soil itself. Here, he offers a manifesto toward a conceptual revolution: Jackson asks us to look to natural ecosystems — or, if one prefers, nature in general — as the measure against which we judge all of our agricultural practices. He believes the time is right to do away with monocultures, which are vulnerable to national security threats and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs. Soil erosion, overgrazing, and the poisons polluting our water and air — all associated with our contemporary form of American agriculture — foretell a population with its physical health and land destroyed.
Growing a Garden City offers compelling photographs and personal narratives of community garden members, graduate students and first graders, a low-income senior and troubled teen, a foodie, a food bank officer, and many more. They describe their setbacks and successes involved with community gardening and show how to build on and emulate their achievements anywhere across the country and around the world.
Contrary to popular belief, many small, locally owned businesses actually out-perform their “big box” and Fortune 500 competition – both in outright profitability and the value they bring to consumers, workers, and communities.
Gary Nabhan’s year-long mission to eat only foods grown, fished, or gathered within 220 miles of his Arizona home offers striking, timely insights into our evolving relationship with food and place – and encourages us to redefine “eating close to home” as an act of deep cultural and environmental significance.
