Grist has a crowd-sourced list of the year’s best food books. The big winners? Paul Greenberg’s Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food and Jan Poppendick’s Free for All: Fixing School Food in America.
The list also mentions one of my personal favorites, The Town That Food Saved. Here’s what I had to say in my June review:
The narrative feels part journalistic account, part memoir, as Hewitt guides us through his ever-changing attitude towards the evolution of this hard-scrabble agricultural community. When speaking to the up-and-coming “agrepreneurs”—Tom Searns of High Mowing Organic Seeds, Andrew Meyer of Vermont Soy—the writer is admittedly swept up in their rhetoric of localized food systems and halcyon days ahead. But when confronted by some of the town’s old-timers and their equally-powerful arguments against a “local” system that relies so heavily on luxury items and the export of goods to urban centers, Hewitt isn’t shy about his internal conflict.
