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Title details for Foodtopia by Margot Anne Kelley - Available

Foodtopia

Communities in Pursuit of Peace, Love, & Homegrown Food

by Margot Anne Kelley
Nicol Zanzarella
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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Throughout America's history as an industrial nation, sizable countercultural movements have chosen to forgo modern comforts in pursuit of a simpler life. In this illuminating alternative American history, Margot Anne Kelley details the evolution of food-centric utopian movements that were fueled by deep yearnings for unpolluted water and air, racial and gender equality, for peace, for a less consumerist lifestyle, for a sense of authenticity, for simplicity, for a healthy diet, and for a sustaining connection to the natural world.
Millennials who jettisoned cities for rural life form the core of America's current back-to-the-land movement. These young farmers helped meet surges in supplies for food when COVID-19 ravaged lives and economies, and laid bare limitations in America's industrial food supply chain.
Today, food has become an important element of the social justice movement. Food is no longer just about what we eat, but about how our food is raised and who profits along the way. Kelley looks closely at the efforts of young farmers now growing heirloom pigs, culturally appropriate foods, and newly bred vegetables, along with others working in coalitions, advocacy groups, and educational programs to extend the reach of this era's Good Food Movement.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    December 13, 2022

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9798765055755
      • File size: 320928 KB
      • Duration: 11:08:35

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 30, 2022
      Environmental writer Kelley (Local Treasures) puts a human face on the back-to-the-land movement with fascinating profiles of the “renegades” behind the centuries-old phenomenon. Tracing food’s function as political expression throughout history, Kelley paints in vivid detail the lives of such food pioneers as homesteader Scott Nearing, coauthor of the 1954 classic Living the Good Life, and Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters; dips into Walden Pond, Thoreau’s “utopian back-to-the-land experiment”; explores the food activism of the Diggers of 1960s San Francisco, who believed that “food should not be corporatized”; and moves to the present, examining the ways the Covid pandemic gave rise to a new crop of millennial farmers. Kelley, herself “part of a shift in the zeitgeist” when she and her husband left Boston for Maine in the 2000s, employs an earnest, occasionally poetic tone (“The air was suffused with the scents of rhubarb and Earl Grey tea”) but isn’t starry-eyed, taking pains to underscore the persistent “racial inequity in the US food system.” Whether assessing the influence of the macrobiotic diet or considering a project to repurpose a former county jail into a grain mill, she excels at drawing the big picture around human relationships to food, resulting in a satisfyingly substantive work. Farmers and foodies will savor every delectable insight.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Nicol Zanzarella narrates crisply with a sure sense of timing that propels this wide-ranging love letter to food communitarians, back-to-the-land advocates, and those who try their hands at agriculture. Her conversational style fits the first-person memoir parts of the text, and she smoothly moves to the many historical profiles that range from Thoreau to Stuart Brand, editor of THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOG. The author hits the highlights and lowlights of utopians like Bronson Alcott (brother of Louisa May), whose Fruitlands experiment was short-lived, as was fellow Transcendentalist George Ripley's Brook Farm. But she thoughtfully captures the countercultural yearning of the young and their desires for self-sufficiency and sustainability. She credits recent movements that range from organic crops to farming with horse-drawn tractors to this historic American impulse to live off the land. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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