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Summer's Top 5 Sustainable Food Books
Aug 18 2011
As summer draws to an end, Roots of Change (ROC) wanted to know what were this summer’s top five sustainable food books to read.&nbs p; In a recent Facebook poll, ROC asked its followers to vote and tell us which books made their summer list. Below are the results.
1. Tomatoland by Barry Estabrook
Tomatoland traces the supermarket tomato from its birthplace in the deserts of Peru to the impoverished town of Immokalee, Florida, also known as the tomato capital of the United States.
2. American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food by Jonathan Bloom
American Wasteland chronicles how we waste food from farm to fork and examines the impact of our wastefulness. With an upbeat tone, the book offers suggestions on how we - as a nation and as individuals - can trim our waste.
3. Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg
In Four Fish, award-winning writer and lifelong fisherman Paul Greenberg takes us on a culinary journey, exploring the history of the fish that dominate our menus--salmon, sea bass, cod and tuna--and examining where each stands at this critical moment in time.
4. Chasing Chiles: Hot Spots Along the Pepper Trail by Kurt Michael Friese, Kraig Kraft and Gary Paul Nabhan
Chasing Chiles looks at both the future of place-based foods and the effects of climate change on agriculture through the lens of the Chile pepper—from the farmers who cultivate this iconic crop to the cuisines and cultural traditions in which peppers play a huge role.
5. Keeping Pet Chickens: You don't need much space to Enjoy the Bounty of Fresh Eggs from Your Own Small Flock of Happy Hens by Johannes Paul, William Windham and Joe Stahlkuppe
Keeping Pet Chickens offers essential advice, provides the basic, easy-to-follow illustrations to master every aspect of keeping and raising healthy and productive poultry. Published in 2005 this book continues to gain momentum as the urban ag movement gets bigger.
If you've got a few recommendations of your own, be sure to let us know in the comments section located below.
Comments
THE FAMILY DINNER by Laurie David
I would strongly recommend The Family Dinner by Laurie David. While ostensibly a cookbook, this book is actually a manifesto for healthy, green and sustainable eating practices. Ms. David, a producer of the Oscar winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, has turned her attention to this country's eating habits and has written a book that encourages people to get off the fast food drive thru lines and back into their kitchens, cooking real, preferably organic, food for their families.
She suggests numerous ways to reduce our obsession with and consumption of meat and shows how growing gardens in backyards, pots and balconies not only can be done, but is extremely rewarding as well. And. . .she is a huge advocate of engaging children in the growing and cooking process. . . if you want to start a revolution, you definitely want to include the young people. The food revolution is no exception.
Everyone should have this book in their homes. Not only for the delicious recipes (many of them meatless), but for the ideas around growing, making and serving dinner. As a country, we need to take back our food supply and take back dinnertime. And have some fun while doing so.
Reading FAIR FOOD by Dr. Oran Hesterman
This book just came out a couple of months ago and focuses on solutions as opposed to more doom and gloom and bad news, which has been the tendencies over the past few years. Hesterman ran the Kellogg Foundation for 12 years and has been working on fixing our broken food system for more than 35 years. Highly recommended.
Greg Roden
www.foodforward.tv
SUSTAINABLE FOOD GREAT READING
Just devoured a tasty dish: PACIFIC FEAST: A Cook's Guide to West Coast Foraging and Cuisine by Jennifer Hahn, Skipstone, 2010.
Hahn, a wilderness guide and professor at Western Washington University, takes the reader on adventures digging up horse clams, netting sea urchins, plucking wild greens, hunting porcini mushrooms, scooping up sea veggies and simmering evergreen-tip tea. Best, she believes in "preservation through the palate" and says how to do it all sustainably. Hahn chose species that are common and delicious. She hopes readers fall in love with wild food through their palate and then work to be good stewards. It's a treasure trove of personal anecdote, culinary tidbits, natural history, wilderness and backyard ventures, and First Nation historic plant uses. Plus the book packs in 65 recipes by celebrated wild-food chefs like David Tanis of Chez Panisse who tell you what to do with the stuff. Nettle lasagna...bull kelp chutney...blueberry halibut. Tasty indeed!
Sustainable Food Books recommendations
I keep meeting young folks (40 and under) who never heard of what I consider "required reading for this course".
"Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture" - 1939, Russel-Smith. Classic, but many folks have never heard of it.
"Growing more vegetables..." - Jeavons - another classic that many younger folks don't know.
"Farmers of Forty Centuries: Or Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan" F. H. King - 1911
"The One-Straw Revolution" 1926 Masanobu Fukuoka
And - back in the 1970s, during the Great Cultural Revolution, I joined the peasants on a collective farm in the Mendocino Mountains in California. 20 miles from the highway on the county road, you turned onto a dirt road for another 5 miles, and then when that road ended, you hiked another 3 miles across the canyon to the cabin. It was so far from town (16 miles to our mailbox) that the county library would give us postcards to request books, and if they didn't have it, they'd get it on interlibrary loan for free, and we had no due date on the books.
Most gardening books seemed to be written for an English or Atlantic States 4-seasom climate. I wanted info about Mediterrannean, two-season (wet-dry) climate, and I didn't have power tools, water on tap, or chemical fertilizers. It turns out that there are some excellent and inspiring books on sustainable low-tech agriculture written by the Romans.
Columella's "De Re Rustica" taught me the value of fava beans. It's still well worth a read.
Rashid Patch, Oakland CA
viva Roma
Thank you for sharing!