Foodtopia : communities in pursuit of peace, love & homegrown food

Foodtopia Communities in pursuit of peace, love & homegrown food

Margot Anne Kelley

Book - 2022

"Ever wonder if there's a better way to live, work, and eat? You're not alone. Here is the story of five back-to-the-land movements, from 1840 to present day, when large numbers of utopian-minded people in the United States took action to establish small-scale farming as an alternative to mainstream agriculture. Then and now, it's the story of people striving to live freely and fight injustice, to make the food on their table a little healthier, and to leave the planet less scarred than they found it. 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. Their forebears were the utopians of the 1840s, including Thoreau and his fellow Transcendental friends who created Brook Farm and Fruitlands; the single taxers and "little landers" who created self-sufficient communities at the turn of the last century; Scott and Helen Nearing and others who decamped to the countryside during the Great Depression; and, of course, the hippie back-to-the-landers of the 1970s. 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. Foodtopia is for anyone interested in how we all might lead much better-and well-fed-lives"--

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Subjects
Agriculture, Cooperative > United States > History.
Agriculture > Social aspects > United States > History.
Utopias > United States > History.
Food habits > Social aspects > United States > History.
Food supply > Social aspects > United States > History.
Sustainable agriculture > United States > History.
Urban-rural migration > United States > History.
Published
Boston, Massachusetts : Godine 2022.
Language
English
Main Author
Margot Anne Kelley (author)
Physical Description
xxvii, 307 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 295-307).
ISBN
9781567927306
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1. Millennials Move to the Land
  • Chapter 2. Henry David Thoreau's Search for Freedom
  • Chapter 3. Secular Utopias of the 1840s
  • Chapter 4. Going Back to the Land during America's First Gilded Age
  • Chapter 5. Scott and Helen Nearing Live the Good Life
  • Chapter 6. Food Fights
  • Chapter 7. Hippie Food
  • Chapter 8. Transforming the Food System from Seed to Table
  • Chapter 9. Free the People, Free the Land
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
Review by Booklist Review

This insightful history of American back-to-the-land movements comes from a former urbanite who left her teaching job at a Boston university for a self-sustaining, heirloom-crop farm in Maine. Kelley rapidly moves on from her own experiences to share detailed descriptions of various individuals who decided to get back to local foods and sustainable lifestyles: millennials, Thoreau devotees, hippies. With engaging writing, Kelley provides ample historic, economic, and social context, including quotes and interviews. She takes an empathetic tone, acknowledging how hard it is to get back to the land, whether a couple hundred years ago or today. She documents the actions of the federal government and various industrial farming ventures, discusses political battles and community blowback, and creates engaging profiles of food culture innovators, including Scott Nearing, the father of the sustainable food movement; Alice Waters, a champion of local foods and simple cooking; and Vera Fabian, a contemporary farmer-entrepreneur. This is a thoughtful consideration of a topic that will have a substantial impact on our future.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Aug.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

In this book combining journalism and history, Kelley (A Field Guide to Other People's Trees) traces the philosophical and cultural movements that led to notable utopian experiments in the United States. A new generation of younger people pursuing utopian food system dreams has emerged out of food writing from the early 2000s such as Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle, and while Kelley starts here, her larger project is an examination of the desires around food of previous utopian movements in American history. She also looks at what s particularly resonant about a given landscape or natural environment. As a Maine-based writer, Kelley naturally focuses on New England, but also looks at California's hippie food movements, among others. This book makes the case that food is central to the success of utopian movements--those that assume food will take care of itself are doomed to fail. Kelley writes that wider change has also come from food systems that include mentoring and agricultural training and are deeply embedded in local cultural values and needs (e.g., the Black Panther Party's free breakfast program). VERDICT Essential reading on the state of local and organic growing and eating, and a useful addition to the history of American utopianism.--Margaret Heller

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

An educator and editor shares her appetite for health and justice. The back-to-the-land movement associated with the 1970s is part of a long trajectory that began in the 19th century and continues in the present. Kelley, an enthusiastic vegetable gardener, looks at five periods--in the 1840s, 1900s, 1930s, 1960s, and, most recently, in the 2010s--during which similar efforts took root. "These utopian experimenters," she writes, "have daisy-chained into being an enduring counterforce to the mainstream ethos, one that's based on a love of freedom, equality, reciprocity--and good food." In 1845, industrialization and "agricultural capitalism" sent Thoreau to Walden Pond. "The young freedom seeker recognized this change made farming and food production more centralized, more monopolistic, less healthful, and less conducive to freedom," Kelley asserts. "He set out to prove that an alternative conducive to freedom was still possible." Thoreau's singular experiment was echoed in some 80 communities--Fruitlands and Brook Farm are two of the most well known--scattered throughout New England and the Midwest. All "sought a greater sense of freedom, equality, the abolition of slavery, and communal sufficiency." Later, inequality of access to food, alarm about adulteration and pesticides, and the rise of supermarkets promoting canned and frozen food all inspired efforts to find viable ways to reject agribusiness. Kelley's well-populated narrative includes Scott and Helen Nearing, whose Living the Good Life became a transformative text for many idealistic farmers; Mollie Katzen, author of The Moosewood Cookbook; and Alice Waters, who sparked a food revolution from her Berkeley restaurant. Recounting her visits to farms, conferences, and farmers markets, Kelley offers lively profiles of men and women "intimately and integrally connected to utopians who came before or after them, who inspired or affirmed them, who believed that land is a common good, that farming should be a healthful enterprise, that food should nourish bodies and spirits." An informative, fresh history of food in America. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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