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Fair Trade Rebels
Coffee Production and Struggles for Autonomy in Chiapas
Lindsay Naylor
University of Minnesota Press, 2019

Reassessing interpretations of development with a new approach to fair trade


Is fair trade really fair? Who is it for, and who gets to decide? Fair Trade Rebels addresses such questions in a new way by shifting the focus from the abstract concept of fair trade—and whether it is “working”—to the perspectives of small farmers. It examines the everyday experiences of resistance and agricultural practice among the campesinos/as of Chiapas, Mexico, who struggle for dignified livelihoods in self-declared autonomous communities in the highlands, confronting inequalities locally in what is really a global corporate agricultural chain.

Based on extensive fieldwork, Fair Trade Rebels draws on stories from Chiapas that have emerged from the farmers’ interaction with both the fair-trade–certified marketplace and state violence. Here Lindsay Naylor discusses the racialized and historical backdrop of coffee production and rebel autonomy in the highlands, underscores the divergence of movements for fairer trade and the so-called alternative certified market, traces the network of such movements from the highlands and into the United States, and evaluates existing food sovereignty and diverse economic exchanges. 

Putting decolonial thinking in conversation with diverse economies theory, Fair Trade Rebels evaluates fair trade not by the measure of its success or failure but through a unique, place-based approach that expands our understanding of the relationship between fair trade, autonomy, and economic development.

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Famine Foods
Plants We Eat to Survive
Paul E. Minnis
University of Arizona Press, 2021

How people eat today is a record of food use through the ages—and not just the decadent, delicious foods but the less glamorous and often life-saving foods from periods of famine as well. In Famine Foods, Paul E. Minnis focuses on the myriad plants that have sustained human populations throughout the course of history, unveiling the those that people have consumed, and often still consume, to avoid starvation. For the first time, this book offers a fascinating overview of famine foods—how they are used, who uses them, and, perhaps most importantly, why they may be critical to sustain human life in the future.

In addition to a broader discussion of famine foods, Minnis includes fourteen short case studies that examine the use of alternative foods in human societies throughout the world, from hunter-gatherers to major nations. When environmental catastrophes, war, corrupt governments, annual hunger seasons, and radical agricultural policies have threatened to starve populations, cultural knowledge and memories of food shortages have been crucial to the survival of millions of people.Famine Foods dives deeply into the cultural contexts of famine food use, showing the curious, strange, and often unpleasant foods people have turned to in order to get by. There is not a single society or area of the world that is immune to severe food shortages, and gaining a deeper knowledge of famine foods will be relevant for the foreseeable future of humanity.

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Famine in the Remaking
Food System Change and Mass Starvation in Hawaii, Madagascar, and Cambodia
Stian Rice
West Virginia University Press, 2020
Mass starvation’s causes may seem simple and immediate: crop failure, poverty, outbreaks of violence, and poor governance. But famines are complex, and scholars cannot fully understand what causes them unless they look at their numerous social and environmental precursors over long arcs of history and over long distances.
Famine in the Remaking examines the relationship between the reorganization of food systems and large-scale food crises through a comparative historical analysis of three famines: Hawaii in the 1820s, Madagascar in the 1920s, and Cambodia in the 1970s. This examination identifies the structural transformations—that is, changes to the relationships between producers and consumers—that make food systems more vulnerable to failure. Moving beyond the economic and political explanations for food crisis that have dominated the literature, Stian Rice emphasizes important socioecological interactions, developing a framework for crisis evolution that identifies two distinct temporal phases and five different types of causal mechanisms involved in food system failure. His framework contributes to current work in famine prevention and, animated by a commitment to social justice, offers the potential for early intervention in emerging food crises.
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Famine Relief in Warlord China
Pierre Fuller
Harvard University Press, 2019

Famine Relief in Warlord China is a reexamination of disaster responses during the greatest ecological crisis of the pre-Nationalist Chinese republic. In 1920–1921, drought and ensuing famine devastated more than 300 counties in five northern provinces, leading to some 500,000 deaths. Long credited to international intervention, the relief effort, Pierre Fuller shows, actually began from within Chinese social circles. Indigenous action from the household to the national level, modeled after Qing-era relief protocol, sustained the lives of millions of the destitute in Beijing, in the surrounding districts of Zhili (Hebei) Province, and along the migrant and refugee trail in Manchuria, all before joint foreign-Chinese international relief groups became a force of any significance.

Using district gazetteers, stele inscriptions, and the era’s vibrant Chinese press, Fuller reveals how a hybrid civic sphere of military authorities working with the public mobilized aid and coordinated migrant movement within stricken communities and across military domains. Ultimately, the book’s spotlight on disaster governance in northern China in 1920 offers new insights into the social landscape just before the region’s descent, over the next decade, into incessant warfare, political struggle, and finally the normalization of disaster itself.

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Farm
A Multimodal Reader
Joyce Kinkead
Utah State University Press, 2020
In Farm, Joyce Kinkead, Evelyn Funda, and Lynne S. McNeill explore the culture of agriculture through a diverse and multicultural collection of fiction, poetry, essays, art, recipes, and folklore. This reader views farming through a variety of lenses, asking students to consider what farms, farming, and farmers mean, and have meant, to culture in the United States.
 
In the text, readers are guided through the Jeffersonian idealism of the yeoman farmer (“cultivators of the earth are the chosen people of God”) to literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Thoreau’s “The Bean-Field,” Cather’s prairie trilogy, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and Carpenter’s Farm City). Contributors provide historical context for the literary texts, such as discussion of sharecropping vs. plantation systems, the rise of agribusiness and chemical farming, and Teddy Roosevelt’s Country Life Commission. Written, visual, and oral texts ask readers to consider the farm in art (Grant Wood), ecology (Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring), children’s and young adult literature (classic children’s books, YA novels, nonfiction, and poetry), advertising (from early boosterism to Chipotle videos), print culture (farmers’ market and victory garden posters from both world wars), folklore (food culture, vintners, and veterinarian practices), popular culture (Farm Aid concerts), and much more. Each reading is supported by activities, exercises, projects, and visual rhetorical elements that further connect students to agriculture and the essential work of farmers.
 
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The Farm Bill
A Citizen's Guide
Daniel Imhoff with Christina Badaracco
Island Press, 2018
The farm bill is one of the most important pieces of legislation the American president signs. Negotiated every five to seven years, it has tremendous implications for food production, nutrition assistance, habitat conservation, international trade, and much more. Yet at nearly 1,000 pages, it is difficult to understand for policymakers, let alone citizens. In this primer, Dan Imhoff and Christina Badaracco translate all the “legalese" and political jargon into an accessible, graphics-rich 200 pages.

Readers will learn the basic elements of the bill, its origins and history, and perhaps most importantly, the battles that will determine the direction of food policy in the coming years. The authors trace how the legislation has evolved, from its first incarnation during the Great Depression, to today, when America has become the world’s leading agricultural powerhouse. They explain the three main components of the bill—farm subsidies, food stamps or SNAP, and conservation programs—as well as how crucial public policies are changing.

With a new farm bill just signed into law, we all need to understand the implications of food policy. What’s the impact of crop insurance? How does SNAP actually work? What would it take to create a healthier, more sustainable food system? These are questions that affect not only farmers, but everyone who eats. If you care about the answers, The Farm Bill is your guide.
 
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Farm to Form
Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire
Jessica Martell
University of Nevada Press, 2020
In this groundbreaking book, Jessica Martell investigates the relationship between industrial food and the emergence of literary modernisms in Britain and Ireland. By the early twentieth century, the industrialization of the British Empire’s food system had rendered many traditional farming operations, and attendant agrarian ways of life, obsolete. Weaving insights from modernist studies, food studies, and ecocriticism, Farm to Form contends that industrial food made nature “modernist,” a term used as literary scholars understand it—stylistically disorienting, unfamiliar, and artificial but also exhilarating, excessive, and above all, new. Martell draws in part upon archives in the United Kingdom but also presents imperial foodways as an extended rehearsal for the current era of industrial food supremacy. She analyzes how pastoral mode, anachronism, fragmentation, and polyvocal narration reflect the power of the literary arts to reckon with—and to resist—the new “modernist ecologies” of the twentieth century.

Deeply informed by Martell’s extensive knowledge of modern British, Irish, American, and World Literatures, this progressive work positions modernism as central to the study of narratives of resistance against social and environmental degradation. Analyzed works include those of Thomas Hardy, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, George Russell, and James Joyce.

In light of climate change, fossil fuel supremacy, nutritional dearth, and other pressing food issues, modernist texts bring to life an era of crisis and anxiety similar to our own. In doing so, Martell summons the past as a way to employ the modernist term of “defamiliarizing” the present so that entrenched perceptions can be challenged. Our current food regime is both new and constantly evolving with the first industrial food trades. Studying earlier cultural responses to them invites us to return to persistent problems with new insights and renewed passion.
 
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Farmers' Markets of the Heartland
Janine MacLachlan
University of Illinois Press, 2012

A visual feast of the Midwest's homegrown bounty

In this splendidly illustrated book, food writer and self-described farm groupie Janine MacLachlan embarks on a tour of seasonal markets and farmstands throughout the Midwest, sampling local flavors from Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. She conducts delicious research as she meets farmers, tastes their food, and explores how their businesses thrive in the face of an industrial food supply. She tells the stories of a pair of farmers growing specialty crops on a few acres of northern Michigan for just a few months out of the year, an Ohio cattle farm that has raised heritage beef since 1820, and a Minnesota farmer who tirelessly champions the Jimmy Nardello sweet Italian frying pepper. Along the way, she savors vibrant red carrots, slurpy peaches, vast quantities of specialty cheeses, and some of the tastiest pie to cross anyone's lips.

Informed by debates about eating local, seasonal crops, organic farming, sanitation, and biodiversity, Farmers' Markets of the Heartland tantalizes with special recipes from farm-friendly chefs and dozens of luscious color photographs that will inspire you to harvest the homegrown flavors in your own neighborhood.

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Farming and Famine
Landscape Vulnerability in Northeast Ethiopia, 1889–1991
Donald E. Crummey; Edited by James C. McCann
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
In modern times, Ethiopia has suffered three grievous famines, two of which—in 1973–74 and in 1984–85—caught the world's attention. It is often assumed that population increase drove Ethiopia's farmers to overexploit their environment and thus undermine the future of their own livelihoods, part of a larger global process of deforestation. In Farming and Famine, Donald E. Crummey explores and refutes these claims based on his research in Wallo province, an epicenter of both famines.

Crummey draws on photographs comparing identical landscapes in 1937 and 1997 as well as interviews with local farmers, among other sources. He reveals that forestation actually increased due to farmers' tree-planting initiatives. More broadly, he shows that, in the face of growing environmental stress, Ethiopian farmers have innovated and adapted. Yet the threat of famine remains because of constricted access to resources and erratic rainfall. To avoid future famines, Crummey suggests, Ethiopia's farmers must transform agricultural productivity, but they cannot achieve that on their own.
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Feeding Cahokia
Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland
Gayle J. Fritz
University of Alabama Press, 2019
Winner of the 2020 Society for Economic Botany's Mary W. Klinger Book Award

An authoritative and thoroughly accessible overview of farming and food practices at Cahokia
 
Agriculture is rightly emphasized as the center of the economy in most studies of Cahokian society, but the focus is often predominantly on corn. This farming economy is typically framed in terms of ruling elites living in mound centers who demanded tribute and a mass surplus to be hoarded or distributed as they saw fit. Farmers are cast as commoners who grew enough surplus corn to provide for the elites.
 
Feeding Cahokia: Early Agriculture in the North American Heartland presents evidence to demonstrate that the emphasis on corn has created a distorted picture of Cahokia’s agricultural practices. Farming at Cahokia was biologically diverse and, as such, less prone to risk than was maize-dominated agriculture. Gayle J. Fritz shows that the division between the so-called elites and commoners simplifies and misrepresents the statuses of farmers—a workforce consisting of adult women and their daughters who belonged to kin groups crosscutting all levels of the Cahokian social order. Many farmers had considerable influence and decision-making authority, and they were valued for their economic contributions, their skills, and their expertise in all matters relating to soils and crops. Fritz examines the possible roles played by farmers in the processes of producing and preparing food and in maintaining cosmological balance.
 
This highly accessible narrative by an internationally known paleoethnobotanist highlights the biologically diverse agricultural system by focusing on plants, such as erect knotweed, chenopod, and maygrass, which were domesticated in the midcontinent and grown by generations of farmers before Cahokia Mounds grew to be the largest Native American population center north of Mexico. Fritz also looks at traditional farming systems to apply strategies that would be helpful to modern agriculture, including reviving wild and weedy descendants of these lost crops for redomestication. With a wealth of detail on specific sites, traditional foods, artifacts such as famous figurines, and color photos of significant plants, Feeding Cahokia will satisfy both scholars and interested readers.
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Feeding Manila in Peace and War, 1850–1945
Daniel F. Doeppers
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
Getting food, water, and services to the millions who live in the world’s few dozen megacities is one of the twenty-first century’s most formidable challenges. This innovative history traces nearly a century in the life of the megacity of Manila to show how it grew and what sustained it. Focusing on the city’s key commodities—rice, produce, fish, fowl, meat, milk, flour, coffee—Daniel F. Doeppers explores their complex interconnections, the changing ecology of the surrounding region, and the social fabric that weaves together farmers, merchants, transporters, storekeepers, and door-to-door vendors.
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Feeding the City
From Street Market to Liberal Reform in Salvador, Brazil, 1780–1860
By Richard Graham
University of Texas Press, 2010

Winner, Bolton-Johnson Prize, Conference on Latin American History, 2011
Murdo J. McLeod Book Prize, 2011

On the eastern coast of Brazil, facing westward across a wide magnificent bay, lies Salvador, a major city in the Americas at the end of the eighteenth century. Those who distributed and sold food, from the poorest street vendors to the most prosperous traders—black and white, male and female, slave and free, Brazilian, Portuguese, and African—were connected in tangled ways to each other and to practically everyone else in the city, and are the subjects of this book. Food traders formed the city's most dynamic social component during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, constantly negotiating their social place. The boatmen who brought food to the city from across the bay decisively influenced the outcome of the war for Brazilian independence from Portugal by supplying the insurgents and not the colonial army. Richard Graham here shows for the first time that, far from being a city sharply and principally divided into two groups—the rich and powerful or the hapless poor or enslaved—Salvador had a population that included a great many who lived in between and moved up and down.

The day-to-day behavior of those engaged in food marketing leads to questions about the government's role in regulating the economy and thus to notions of justice and equity, questions that directly affected both food traders and the wider consuming public. Their voices significantly shaped the debate still going on between those who support economic liberalization and those who resist it.

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Feeding the Future
School Lunch Programs as Global Social Policy
Rutledge, Jennifer Geist
Rutgers University Press, 2016
A century ago, only local charities existed to feed children. Today 368 million children receive school lunches in 151 countries, in programs supported by state and national governments. In Feeding the Future, Jennifer Geist Rutledge investigates how and why states have assumed responsibility for feeding children, chronicling the origins and spread of school lunch programs around the world, starting with the adoption of these programs in the United States and some Western European nations, and then tracing their growth through the efforts of the World Food Program.
 
The primary focus of Feeding the Future is on social policy formation: how and why did school lunch programs emerge? Given that all countries developed education systems, why do some countries have these programs and others do not? Rutledge draws on a wealth of information—including archival resources, interviews with national policymakers in several countries, United Nations data, and agricultural statistics—to underscore the ways in which a combination of ideological and material factors led to the creation of these enduringly popular policies. She shows that, in many ways, these programs emerged largely as an unintended effect of agricultural policy that rewarded farmers for producing surpluses. School lunches provided a ready outlet for this surplus. She also describes how, in each of the cases of school lunch creation, policy entrepreneurs, motivated by a commitment to alleviate childhood malnutrition, harnessed different ideas that were relevant to their state or organization in order to funnel these agricultural surpluses into school lunch programs.  
 
The public debate over how we feed our children is becoming more and more politically charged. Feeding the Future provides vital background to these debates, illuminating the history of food policies and the ways our food system is shaped by global social policy.  
 
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Fifty Must-Try Craft Beers of Ohio
Rick Armon
Ohio University Press, 2017

Every craft beer has a story, and part of the fun is learning where the liquid gold in your glass comes from. In Fifty Must-Try Craft Beers of Ohio, veteran beer writer Rick Armon picks the can’t-miss brews in a roundup that will handily guide everyone from the newest beer aficionado to those with the most seasoned palates. Some are crowd pleasers, some are award winners, some are just plain unusual—the knockout beers included here are a tiny sample of what Ohio has to offer.

In the midst of the ongoing nationwide renaissance in local beer culture, Ohio has become a major center for the creation of quality craft brews, and Armon goes behind the scenes to figure out what accounts for the state’s beer alchemy. He asked the brewers themselves about the great idea or the happy accident that made each beer what it is. The book includes brewer profiles, quintessentially Ohio food pairings (sauerkraut balls and Cincinnati chili!), and more.

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The Fish Factory
Work And Meaning For Black And White Fishermen
Barbara Jean Garrity
University of Tennessee Press, 1995

Focusing on the menhaden fishermen of the southern coastal regions, The Fish Factory is an engaging and insightful exploration of what work means to different social groups employed within the same industry.

Since the nineteenth century, the menhaden industry in the South has been traditionally split between black crews and white captains. Using life histories, historical research, and anthropological fieldwork in Reedville, Virginia, and Beaufort, North Carolina, Barbara Garrity-Blake examines the relationship between these two groups and how the members of each have defined themselves in terms of their work. The author finds that for the captains and other white officers of the menhaden vessels—men “born and bred” for a life on the water—work is a key source of identity. Black crewmen, however, have insisted on a separation between work and self; they view their work primarily as a means of support rather than an end in itself.

In probing the implications of this contrast, Garrity-Blake describes captain/crew relations within both an occupational context and the context of race relations in the South. She shows how those at the bottom of the shipboard hierarchy have exercised a measure of influence in a relationship at once asymmetrical and mutually dependent. She also explores how each group has reacted to the advent of technology in their industry and, most recently, to the challenges posed by those proclaiming a conservationist ethic.

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Food Across Borders
Garcia, Matt
Rutgers University Press, 2017
The act of eating defines and redefines borders. What constitutes “American” in our cuisine has always depended on a liberal crossing of borders, from “the line in the sand” that separates Mexico and the United States, to the grassland boundary with Canada, to the imagined divide in our collective minds between “our” food and “their” food. Immigrant workers have introduced new cuisines and ways of cooking that force the nation to question the boundaries between “us” and “them.”  

The stories told in Food Across Borders highlight the contiguity between the intimate decisions we make as individuals concerning what we eat and the social and geopolitical processes we enact to secure nourishment, territory, and belonging.   

Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.
 
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Food Allergy Advocacy
Parenting and the Politics of Care
Danya Glabau
University of Minnesota Press, 2022

A detailed exploration of parents’ fight for a safe environment for their kids, interrogating how race, class, and gender shape health advocacy 

The success of food allergy activism in highlighting the dangers of foodborne allergens shows how illness communities can effectively advocate for the needs of their members. In Food Allergy Advocacy, Danya Glabau follows parents and activists as they fight for allergen-free environments, accurate labeling, the fair application of disability law, and access to life-saving medications for food-allergic children in the United States. At the same time, she shows how this activism also reproduces the culturally dominant politics of personhood and responsibility, based on an idealized version of the American family, centered around white, middle-class, and heteronormative motherhood.

By holding up the threat of food allergens to the white nuclear family to galvanize political and scientific action, Glabau shows, the movement excludes many, including Black women and disabled adults, whose families and health have too often been marginalized from public health and social safety net programs. Further, its strategies are founded on the assumption that market-based solutions will address issues of social exclusion and equal access to healthcare. 

Sharing the personal experiences of a wide spectrum of people, including parents, support group leaders, physicians, entrepreneurs, and scientists, Food Allergy Advocacy raises important questions about who controls illness activism. Using critical, intersectional feminism to interrogate how race, class, and gender shape activist priorities and platforms, it shows the way to new, justice-focused models of advocacy.

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Food and the City
Histories of Culture and Cultivation
Dorothée Imbert
Harvard University Press

Food and the City explores the physical, social, and political relations between the production of food and urban settlements. Its thirteen essays discuss the multiple scales and ideologies of productive landscapes—from market gardens in sixteenth-century Paris to polder planning near mid-twentieth century Amsterdam to opportunistic agriculture in today’s Global South—and underscore the symbiotic connection between productive landscape and urban form across times and geographies.

The physical proximity of fruit and vegetable production to urban consumers in pre-revolutionary Paris, or the distribution of fish in Imperial Edo, was an essential factor in shaping both city and surroundings. Colonial expansion and modernist planning stressed the essential relation between urbanism and food production, at the scales of both the garden and agriculture. This volume offers a variety of perspectives—from landscape and architectural history to geography—to connect the garden, market, city, and beyond through the lenses of modernism, technology, scale, social justice, and fashion. Essays on the Fascist new settlements in Ethiopia, Le Corbusier’s Radiant Farm and views on rural France, the urban farms in Israel, and the desakota landscape of the Pearl River Delta, to name a few, will appeal to those concerned with urban, landscape, and architectural studies.

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Food, Farms, and Community
Exploring Food Systems
Lisa Chase
University of New Hampshire Press, 2014
Throughout the United States, people are increasingly concerned about where their food comes from, how it is produced, and how its production affects individuals and their communities. The answers to these questions reveal a complex web of interactions. While large, distant farms and multinational companies dominate at national and global levels, innovative programs including farmers' markets, farm-to-school initiatives, and agritourism are forging stronger connections between people and food at local and regional levels. At all levels of the food system, energy use, climate change, food safety, and the maintenance of farmland for the future are critical considerations. The need to understand food systems—what they are, who's involved, and how they work (or don't)—has never been greater.

Food, Farms, and Community: Exploring Food Systems takes an in-depth look at critical issues, successful programs, and challenges for improving food systems spanning a few miles to a few thousand miles. Case studies that delve into the values that drive farmers, food advocates, and food entrepreneurs are interwoven with analysis supported by the latest research. Examples of entrepreneurial farms and organizations working together to build sustainable food systems are relevant to the entire country—and reveal results that are about much more than fresh food.
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Food, Fiber, and the Arid Lands
Edited by William G. McGinnies, Bram J. Goldman, and Patricia G. Paylore
University of Arizona Press, 1971
From the Foreword:

The world’s dramatic awakening to the impact of ecology on the quality of human life, and a new awareness of the potential for exploitation of the desert environment—in which our particular interest lies—give rise to more thoughtful, even sober, attention to the problems faced by those aspiring only to bigger yields from crops and more protein from animals. To these very basic needs of food and fiber, we are, therefore, addressing ourselves further to a consideration of housing, educational programs, and nonagrarian resource evolution, to the end that the planners and the decision makers may have the benefit of the most intelligent and contemporary understanding possible of the cultural and social aspects of arid lands as well as the latest technological advances on a wide-ranging spectrum of scientific developments.
 
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Food Fight!
Millennial Mestizaje Meets the Culinary Marketplace
Paloma Martinez-Cruz
University of Arizona Press, 2019
From the racial defamation and mocking tone of “Mexican” restaurants geared toward the Anglo customer to the high-end Latin-inspired eateries with Anglo chefs who give the impression that the food was something unattended or poorly handled that they “discovered” or “rescued” from actual Latinos, the dilemma of how to make ethical choices in food production and consumption is always as close as the kitchen recipe, coffee pot, or table grape.

In Food Fight! author Paloma Martinez-Cruz takes us on a Chicanx gastronomic journey that is powerful and humorous. Martinez-Cruz tackles head on the real-world politics of food production from the exploitation of farmworkers to the appropriation of Latinx bodies and culture, and takes us right into transformative eateries that offer a homegrown, mestiza consciousness.

The hard-hitting essays in Food Fight! bring a mestiza critique to today’s pressing discussions of labeling, identity, and imaging in marketing and dining. Not just about food, restaurants, and coffee, this volume employs a decolonial approach and engaging voice to interrogate ways that mestizo, Indigenous, and Latinx peoples are objectified in mainstream ideology and imaginary.
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Food for Dissent
Natural Foods and the Consumer Counterculture since the 1960s
Maria McGrath
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
In the 1960s and early 1970s, countercultural rebels decided that, rather than confront the system, they would create the world they wanted. The natural foods movement grew out of this contrarian spirit. Through a politics of principled shopping, eating, and entrepreneurship, food revolutionaries dissented from corporate capitalism and mainstream America.

In Food for Dissent, Maria McGrath traces the growth of the natural foods movement from its countercultural fringe beginning to its twenty-first-century "food revolution" ascendance, focusing on popular natural foods touchstones—vegetarian cookbooks, food co-ops, and health advocates. Guided by an ideology of ethical consumption, these institutions and actors spread the movement's oppositionality and transformed America's foodscape, at least for some. Yet this strategy proved an uncertain instrument for the advancement of social justice, environmental defense, and anti-corporatism. The case studies explored in Food for Dissent indicate the limits of using conscientious eating, shopping, and selling as tools for civic activism.
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Food from the Radical Center
Healing Our Land and Communities
Gary Paul Nabhan
Island Press, 2018
"Informational and inspirational." Booklist

America has never felt more divided. But in the midst of all the acrimony comes one of the most promising movements in our country’s history. People of all races, faiths, and political persuasions are coming together to restore America's natural wealth: its ability to produce healthy foods.

In Food from the Radical Center, Gary Nabhan tells the stories of diverse communities who are getting their hands dirty and bringing back North America's unique fare: bison, sturgeon, camas lilies, ancient grains, turkeys, and more. These efforts have united people from the left and right, rural and urban, faith-based and science-based, in game-changing collaborations. Their successes are extraordinary by any measure, whether economic, ecological, or social. In fact, the restoration of land and rare species has provided—dollar for dollar—one of the best returns on investment of any conservation initiative.

As a leading thinker and seasoned practitioner in biocultural conservation, Nabhan offers a truly unique perspective on the movement. He draws on fifty years of work with community-based projects around the nation, from the desert Southwest to the low country of the Southeast. Yet Nabhan’s most enduring legacy may be his message of hope: a vision of a new environmentalism that is just and inclusive, allowing former adversaries to commune over delicious foods. 
 
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Food, Genes, and Culture
Eating Right for Your Origins
Gary Paul Nabhan
Island Press, 2014

Vegan, low fat, low carb, slow carb: Every diet seems to promise a one-size-fits-all solution to health. But they ignore the diversity of human genes and how they interact with what we eat.

In Food, Genes, and Culture, renowned ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan shows why the perfect diet for one person could be disastrous for another. If your ancestors were herders in Northern Europe, milk might well provide you with important nutrients, whereas if you’re Native American, you have a higher likelihood of lactose intolerance. If your roots lie in the Greek islands, the acclaimed Mediterranean diet might save your heart; if not, all that olive oil could just give you stomach cramps.

Nabhan traces food traditions around the world, from Bali to Mexico, uncovering the links between ancestry and individual responses to food. The implications go well beyond personal taste. Today’s widespread mismatch between diet and genes is leading to serious health conditions, including a dramatic growth over the last 50 years in auto-immune and inflammatory diseases.

Readers will not only learn why diabetes is running rampant among indigenous peoples and heart disease has risen among those of northern European descent, but may find the path to their own perfect diet.


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Food Instagram
Identity, Influence, and Negotiation
Edited by Emily J. H. Contois and Zenia Kish
University of Illinois Press, 2022
Winner of the 2023 Association for the Study of Food and Society Book Prize for Edited Volume

Image by image and hashtag by hashtag, Instagram has redefined the ways we relate to food. Emily J. H. Contois and Zenia Kish edit contributions that explore the massively popular social media platform as a space for self-identification, influence, transformation, and resistance. Artists and journalists join a wide range of scholars to look at food’s connection to Instagram from vantage points as diverse as Hong Kong’s camera-centric foodie culture, the platform’s long history with feminist eateries, and the photography of Australia’s livestock producers. What emerges is a portrait of an arena where people do more than build identities and influence. Users negotiate cultural, social, and economic practices in a place that, for all its democratic potential, reinforces entrenched dynamics of power.

Interdisciplinary in approach and transnational in scope, Food Instagram offers general readers and experts alike new perspectives on an important social media space and its impact on a fundamental area of our lives.

Contributors: Laurence Allard, Joceline Andersen, Emily Buddle, Robin Caldwell, Emily J. H. Contois, Sarah E. Cramer, Gaby David, Deborah A. Harris, KC Hysmith, Alex Ketchum, Katherine Kirkwood, Zenia Kish, Stinne Gunder Strøm Krogager, Jonathan Leer, Yue-Chiu Bonni Leung, Yi-Chieh Jessica Lin, Michael Z. Newman, Tsugumi Okabe, Rachel Phillips, Sarah Garcia Santamaria, Tara J. Schuwerk, Sarah E. Tracy, Emily Truman, Dawn Woolley, and Zara Worth

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Food Justice Now!
Deepening the Roots of Social Struggle
Joshua Sbicca
University of Minnesota Press, 2018

A rallying cry to link the food justice movement to broader social justice debates


The United States is a nation of foodies and food activists, many of them progressives, and yet their overwhelming concern for what they consume often hinders their engagement with social justice more broadly. Food Justice Now! charts a path from food activism to social justice activism that integrates the two. It calls on the food-focused to broaden and deepen their commitment to the struggle against structural inequalities both within and beyond the food system. 

In an engrossing, historically grounded, and ethnographically rich narrative, Joshua Sbicca argues that food justice is more than just a myopic focus on food, allowing scholars and activists alike to investigate the causes behind inequities and evaluate and implement political strategies to overcome them. Focusing on carceral, labor, and immigration crises, Sbicca tells the stories of three California-based food movement organizations, showing that when activists use food to confront neoliberal capitalism and institutional racism, they can creatively expand how to practice and achieve food justice.

Sbicca sets his central argument in opposition to apolitical and individual solutions, discussing national food movement campaigns and the need for economically and racially just food policies—a matter of vital public concern with deep implications for building collective power across a diversity of interests.

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front cover of Food Margins
Food Margins
Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer
Cathy Stanton
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

In a food industry shaped by the abundance, cheapness, and convenience that giant corporations can offer, small-­scale ventures struggle to survive, as anthropologist Cathy Stanton discovered when she joined the effort to save a small food co-­op in a former mill town in western Massachusetts. On the margins of the dominant system, Stanton found herself reckoning with its deep racial and class inequities, and learning that making real change requires a fierce commitment to community and a willingness to change herself as well.

Part memoir and part history lesson, Food Margins traces the tangled economic and political histories of the plantation, the factory, and the supermarket through the life of one New England town. Stanton tells a complex and compelling story of a rural community imagining and creating a viable alternative to the mainstream in a time of increasingly urgent need to build a more socially and ecologically just food system.

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The Food Sharing Revolution
How Start-Ups, Pop-Ups, and Co-Ops are Changing the Way We Eat
Michael S. Carolan
Island Press, 2018
Marvin is a contract hog farmer in Iowa. He owns his land, his barn, his tractor, and his animal crates. He has seen profits drop steadily for the last twenty years and feels trapped. Josh is a dairy farmer on a cooperative in Massachusetts. He doesn’t own his cows, his land, his seed, or even all of his equipment. Josh has a healthy income and feels like he’s made it.

In The Food Sharing Revolution, Michael Carolan tells the stories of traditional producers like Marvin, who are being squeezed by big agribusiness, and entrepreneurs like Josh, who are bucking the corporate food system. The difference is Josh has eschewed the burdens of individual ownership and is tapping into the sharing economy.

Josh and many others are sharing tractors, seeds, kitchen space, their homes, and their cultures. They are business owners like Dorothy, who opened her bakery with the help of a no-interest, crowd-sourced loan. They are chefs like Camilla, who introduces diners to her native Colombian cuisine through peer-to-peer meal sharing. Their success is not only good for aspiring producers, but for everyone who wants an alternative to monocrops and processed foods.

The key to successful sharing, Carolan shows, is actually sharing. He warns that food, just like taxis or hotels, can be co-opted by moneyed interests. But when collaboration is genuine, the sharing economy can offer both producers and eaters freedom, even sovereignty. The result is a healthier, more sustainable, and more ethical way to eat.
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Food Studies in Latin American Literature
Perspectives on the Gastronarrative
Rocío del Aguila
University of Arkansas Press, 2021

Food Studies in Latin American Literature presents a timely collection of essays analyzing a wide array of Latin American narratives through the lens of food studies. Topics explored include potato and maize in colonial and contemporary global narratives; the role of cooking in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s poetics; the centrality of desire in twentieth-century cooking writing by women; the relationship among food, recipes, and national identity; the role of food in travel narratives; and the impact of advertisements on domestic roles.

The contributors included here—experts in Latin American history, literature, and cultural studies—bring a novel, interdisciplinary approach to these explorations, presenting new perspectives on Latin American literature and culture.

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front cover of Food Systems in an Unequal World
Food Systems in an Unequal World
Pesticides, Vegetables, and Agrarian Capitalism in Costa Rica
Ryan E. Galt
University of Arizona Press, 2014
Pesticides, a short-term aid for farmers, can often be harmful, undermining the long-term health of agriculture, ecosystems, and people. The United States and other industrialized countries import food from Costa Rica and other regions. To safeguard the public health, importers now regulate the level and types of pesticides used in the exporters’ food production, which creates “regulatory risk” for the export farmers. Although farmers respond to export regulations by trying to avoid illegal pesticide residues, the food produced for their domestic market lacks similar regulation, creating a double standard of pesticide use.

Food Systems in an Unequal World examines the agrochemical-dependent agriculture of Costa Rica and how its uneven regulation in export versus domestic markets affects Costa Rican vegetable farmers. Examining pesticide-dependent vegetable production within two food systems, the author shows that pesticide use is shaped by three main forces: agrarian capitalism, the governance of food systems throughout the commodity chain, and ecological dynamics driving local food production. Those processes produce unequal outcomes that disadvantage less powerful producers who have more limited choices than larger farmers, who usually have access to better growing environments and thereby can reduce pesticide use and production costs.
 
Despite the rise of alternative food networks, Galt says, persistent problems remain in the conventional food system, including widespread and intensive pesticide use. Facing domestic price squeezes, vegetable farmers in Costa Rica are more likely to supply the national market with produce containing residues of highly toxic pesticides, while using less toxic pesticides on exported vegetables. In seeking solutions, Galt argues for improved governance and research into alternative pest control but emphasizes that the process must be rooted in farmers’ economic well-being.
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Food Town, USA
Seven Unlikely Cities That are Changing the Way We Eat
Mark Winne
Island Press, 2019
Look at any list of America’s top foodie cities and you probably won’t find Boise, Idaho or Sitka, Alaska. Yet they are the new face of the food movement. Healthy, sustainable fare is changing communities across this country, revitalizing towns that have been ravaged by disappearing industries and decades of inequity.

What sparked this revolution? To find out, Mark Winne traveled to seven cities not usually considered revolutionary. He broke bread with brew masters and city council members, farmers and philanthropists, toured start-up incubators and homeless shelters. What he discovered was remarkable, even inspiring.

In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, once a company steel town, investment in the arts has created a robust new market for local restaurateurs. In Alexandria, Louisiana, “one-stop shopping” food banks help clients apply for health insurance along with SNAP benefits. In Jacksonville, Florida, aeroponics are bringing fresh produce to a food desert.

Over the course of his travels, Winne experienced the power of individuals to transform food and the power of food to transform communities. The cities of Food Town, USA remind us that innovation is ripening all across the country, especially in the most unlikely places.
 
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front cover of Food Waste, Food Insecurity, and the Globalization of Food Banks
Food Waste, Food Insecurity, and the Globalization of Food Banks
Daniel N. Warshawsky
University of Iowa Press, 2023
Food banks—warehouses that collect and systematize surplus food—have expanded into one of the largest mechanisms to redistribute food waste. From their origins in North America in the 1960s, food banks provide food to communities in approximately one hundred countries on six continents. This book analyzes the development of food banks across the world and the limits of food charity as a means to reduce food insecurity and food waste.

Based on fifteen years of in-depth fieldwork on four continents, Daniel Warshawsky illustrates how and why food banks proliferate across the globe even though their impacts may be limited. He suggests that we need to reformulate the role of food banks. The mission of food banks needs to be more realistic, as food surpluses cannot reduce food insecurity on a significant scale. Food banks need to regain their institutional independence from the state and corporations, and incorporate the knowledge and experiences of the food insecure in the daily operations of the food system. These collective changes can contribute to a future where food banks play a smaller but more targeted role in food systems.
 
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front cover of The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell
The Food We Eat, the Stories We Tell
Contemporary Appalachian Tables
Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt
Ohio University Press, 2019

Blue Ridge tacos, kimchi with soup beans and cornbread, family stories hiding in cookbook marginalia, African American mountain gardens—this wide-ranging anthology considers all these and more. Diverse contributors show us that contemporary Appalachian tables and the stories they hold offer new ways into understanding past, present, and future American food practices. The poets, scholars, fiction writers, journalists, and food professionals in these pages show us that what we eat gives a beautifully full picture of Appalachia, where it’s been, and where it’s going.

Contributors: Courtney Balestier, Jessie Blackburn, Karida L. Brown, Danille Elise Christensen, Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, Michael Croley, Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt, Robert Gipe, Suronda Gonzalez, Emily Hilliard, Rebecca Gayle Howell, Abigail Huggins, Erica Abrams Locklear, Ronni Lundy, George Ella Lyon, Jeff Mann, Daniel S. Margolies, William Schumann, Lora E. Smith, Emily Wallace, Crystal Wilkinson

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front cover of Forging Communities
Forging Communities
Food and Representation in Medieval and Early Modern Southwestern Europe
Montserrat Piera
University of Arkansas Press, 2018
Forging Communities explores the importance of the cultivation, provision, trade, and exchange of foods and beverages to mankind’s technological advancement, violent conquest, and maritime exploration. The thirteen essays here show how the sharing of food and drink forged social, religious, and community bonds, and how ceremonial feasts as well as domestic daily meals strengthened ties and solidified ethnoreligious identity through the sharing of food customs. The very act of eating and the pleasure derived from it are metaphorically linked to two other sublime activities of the human experience: sexuality and the search for the divine.

This interdisciplinary study of food in medieval and early modern communities connects threads of history conventionally examined separately or in isolation. The intersection of foodstuffs with politics, religion, economics, and culture enhances our understanding of historical developments and cultural continuities through the centuries, giving insight that today, as much as in the past, we are what we eat and what we eat is never devoid of meaning.
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front cover of French Gastronomy and the Magic of Americanism
French Gastronomy and the Magic of Americanism
Rick Fantasia
Temple University Press, 2019

A tectonic shift has occurred in the gastronomic field in France, upsetting the cultural imagination. In a European country captivated by a high-stakes power struggle between chefs and restaurants in the culinary field, the mass marketing of factory-processed industrial cuisine and fast foods has created shock waves in French society, culture, and the economy. 

In this insightful book, French Gastronomy and the Magic of Americanism, Rick Fantasia examines how national identity and the dynamics of cultural meaning-making within gastronomy have changed during a crucial period of transformation, from the 1970s through the 1990s. He illuminates the tensions and surprising points of cooperation between the skill, expertise, tradition, artistry, and authenticity of grand chefs and the industrial practices of food production, preparation, and distribution. 

Fantasia examines the institutions and beliefs that have reinforced notions of French cultural supremacy—such as the rise and reverence of local cuisine—as well as the factors that subvert those notions, such as when famous French chefs lend their names to processed, frozen, and pre-packaged foods available at the supermarket. Ultimately, French Gastronomy and the Magic of Americanism shows what happens to a cultural field, like French gastronomy, when the logic and power of the economic field imposes itself upon it.

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front cover of From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies
From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies
Critical Perspectives on Women and Food
Arlene Voski Avakian
University of Massachusetts Press, 2005
In recent years, scholars from a variety of disciplines have turned their attention to food to gain a better understanding of history, culture, economics, and society. The emerging field of food studies has yielded a great deal of useful research and a host of publications. Missing, however, has been a focused effort to use gender as an analytic tool. This stimulating collection of original essays addresses that oversight, investigating the important connections between food studies and women's studies.

Applying the insights of feminist scholarship to the study of food, the thirteen essays in this volume are arranged under four headings—the marketplace, histories, representations, and resistances. The editors open the book with a substantial introduction that traces the history of scholarly writing on food and maps the terrain of feminist food studies. In the essays that follow, contributors pay particular attention to the ways in which gender, race, ethnicity, class, colonialism, and capitalism have both shaped and been shaped by the production and consumption of food.

In the first section, four essays analyze the influence of large corporations in determining what came to be accepted as proper meals in the United States, including what mothers were expected to feed their babies. The essays in the second section explore how women have held families together by keeping them nourished, from the routines of an early nineteenth-century New Englander to the plight of women who endured the siege of Leningrad.

The essays in the third section focus on the centrality of gender and race in the formation of identities as enacted through food discourse and practices. These case studies range from the Caribbean to the San Luis Valley of Colorado. The final section documents acts of female resistance within the contexts of national or ethnic oppression. From women in colonial India to Armenian American feminists, these essays show how food has served as a means to assert independence and personal identity.

In addition to the editors, contributors include Amy Bentley, Carole M. Counihan, Darra Goldstein, Nancy Jenkins, Alice P. Julier, Leslie Land, Laura Lindenfield, Beheroze F. Shroff, Sharmila Sen, Laura Shapiro, and Jan Whitaker.
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front cover of From Gluttony to Enlightenment
From Gluttony to Enlightenment
The World of Taste in Early Modern Europe
Viktoria von Hoffmann
University of Illinois Press, 2016
Scorned since antiquity as low and animal, the sense of taste is celebrated today as an ally of joy, a source of adventure, and an arena for pursuing sophistication. The French exalted taste as an entrée to ecstasy, and revolutionized their cuisine and language to express this new way of engaging with the world.

Viktoria von Hoffmann explores four kinds of early modern texts--culinary, medical, religious, and philosophical--to follow taste's ascent from the sinful to the beautiful. Combining food studies and sensory history, she takes readers on an odyssey that redefined a fundamental human experience. Scholars and cooks rediscovered a vast array of ways to prepare and present foods. Far-sailing fleets returned to Europe bursting with new vegetables, exotic fruits, and pungent spices. Hosts refined notions of hospitality in the home while philosophers pondered the body and its perceptions. As von Hoffmann shows, these labors produced a sea change in perception and thought, one that moved taste from the base realm of the tongue to the ethereal heights of aesthetics.

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front cover of From the Jewish Heartland
From the Jewish Heartland
Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways
Ellen F. Steinberg and Jack H. Prost
University of Illinois Press, 2013
From the Jewish Heartland: Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways reveals the distinctive flavor of Jewish foods in the Midwest and tracks regional culinary changes through time. Exploring Jewish culinary innovation in America's heartland from the 1800s to today, Ellen F. Steinberg and Jack H. Prost examine recipes from numerous midwestern sources, both kosher and nonkosher, including Jewish homemakers' handwritten manuscripts and notebooks, published journals and newspaper columns, and interviews with Jewish cooks, bakers, and delicatessen owners.
 
With the influx of hundreds of thousands of Jews during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came new recipes and foodways that transformed the culture of the region. Settling into the cities, towns, and farm communities of Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota, Jewish immigrants incorporated local fruits, vegetables, and other comestibles into traditional recipes. Such incomparable gustatory delights include Tzizel bagels and rye breads coated in midwestern cornmeal, baklava studded with locally grown cranberries, dark pumpernickel bread sprinkled with almonds and crunchy Iowa sunflower seeds, tangy ketchup concocted from wild sour grapes, Sephardic borekas (turnovers) made with sweet cherries from Michigan, rich Chicago cheesecakes, native huckleberry pie from St. Paul, and savory gefilte fish from Minnesota northern pike.
 
Steinberg and Prost also consider the effect of improved preservation and transportation on rural and urban Jewish foodways, as reported in contemporary newspapers, magazines, and published accounts. They give special attention to the impact on these foodways of large-scale immigration, relocation, and Americanization processes during the nineteenth century and the efforts of social and culinary reformers to modify traditional Jewish food preparation and ingredients.
 
Including dozens of sample recipes, From the Jewish Heartland: Two Centuries of Midwest Foodways takes readers on a memorable and unique tour of midwestern Jewish cooking and culture.
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front cover of The Future of Family Farms
The Future of Family Farms
Practical Farmers' Legacy Letters Project
Teresa Opheim
University of Iowa Press, 2016
A monumental transfer of farmland is occurring in the United States. The average American farmer is fifty-eight years old, and the 40 percent of farmland owners who lease their land to others are even older: sixty-six on average. Five times as many farmers are over sixty-five as are under thirty-five. What will happen to this land? Who will own it? What if one child wants to farm but can't afford to buy out the nonfarming siblings? What if keeping the farm in the family means foregoing the significant profits that could be earned from selling it? These sometimes painful and divisive questions confront many farmers and farmland owners today. How they answer them will shape their families and the land for generations to come.

The Farm Legacy Letters project, developed by the member-driven nonprofit Practical Farmers of Iowa, is designed to help farmers and farmland owners think about their farm’s future and talk about it with their families. An essential complement to handbooks on business succession, this book gathers the letters and stories of midwestern families about the land they cherish—how they acquired it, what they treasure most about it, and their hopes for its future. Some of the writers descend from families who have owned a particular patch of the earth since the 1800s, while others became farmland owners more recently—one as recently as 2015. Some are no longer farmland owners at all, because—after careful thought about what mattered most to them—they sold their land to the next generation of farmers.

All of these writers hope that, by sharing their farmland legacies, they will encourage others to ponder and then write about the histories, accomplishments, challenges, and hopes for their farmland for the generations who come after they are gone. 
 
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