The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities by Will Allen. 

5/5 rating. 

Book #29 of 2020. Read May 8, 2020.

Just, wow! This book is the incredible story of Will’s life purpose to bring healthy foods to underserved families all around the world, but specifically in his home of Milwaukee.

I absolutely loved this book! Will is a master story-teller, and his mission to bring about a different ethic around farming is superbly needed today where it is absorbed with bigger, more energy-intensive, and ultimately less healthy agribusinesses. Will is running his own urban farm in Milwaukee where he is not only bringing his fresh produce to people of need, but running classes and outreach programs to empower others to become urban farmers.

This book is about Will, but it speaks to the much deeper need to adopt his views of thinking on farming, so the world can become healthier and happier through the healthy products they are able to buy locally and the relationships they build with their neighbor farmers.

Will shows that farming can be impactful to people who otherwise are disconnected from nature and working with their hands. He dreams of a world where urban farms are the norms and cities think they are as important as the utilities and sewer systems.

Everyone should read this book and have their own gardens. If we can begin to grow REAL food and make it the norm, maybe we can fix the current scourge of fast food, chemical additives, and obese, sickly people. Go read this book and become a part of the good food revolution that Will is building!

Quotes:

“Between 1995 and 2011, American farmers received about $277 billion in federal subsidies. And the wealthiest 10 percent of farmers received 75 percent of those subsidies. Almost two-thirds of American farmers didn’t receive any subsidies at all.”

“Nearly half of African Americans born in the year 2000 are expected to develop type II diabetes. Four out of every ten African American men and women over the age of twenty have high blood pressure. Blacks are 30 percent more likely to die young from heart disease than whites. And while some suffer from the effects of too much unhealthy food, others go hungry. Almost one out of every six households in the United States will find themselves fearful sometime this year of not having enough food to eat.”

“In 1974, farmers took home 36 cents of every dollar spent on food in the United States. Today, they get only 14 cents.”

“Food should be a cause for celebration, something that should bring people together.”

“A recent study of the food landscape in several states found that there were four times more grocery stores in neighborhoods with a majority white population than in neighborhoods that were primarily black.”

“There is a useful parable about a man who comes upon a sparrow along the edge of a road. The sparrow is lying on its back with its feet sticking upward.

The man asks the sparrow what it is doing.

‘I heard that the sky is falling,’ the bird replies, ‘and I want to hold it up.’

The man laughs at the bird. ‘You believe that you can hold up the whole sky?’

‘No,’ the bird says. ‘But one does what one can.’”

“Across the South, stories similar to the Gates County lawsuit flooded the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Civil Rights Office in the 1970s and 1980s. But in 1983, President Ronald Reagan closed that office, and the USDA stopped responding to claims of discrimination. In 1984 and 1985, the agency lent $1.3 billion dollars to farmers in order to buy land. Sixteen thousand farmers received these loans. Only 209 of them were black.”

“The problem with Butz’s argument against the meddling of big government is that his policies required the largest government interventions in agriculture in U.S. history. His fencerow to fencerow policy led to an eventual collapse in corn prices from overproduction in the 1980s, requiring large taxpayer-funded support for farmers – a dependence that has continued to this day. In 2000, nearly half of the net income for corn farmers in the United States was paid for by subsidies. In 1972, by contrast, the average annual federal subsidy to a corn producer was less than $100.”

“The average item of food consumed in the United States today travels fifteen hundred miles from producer to consumer, and it is buoyed on a sea of oil and gasoline. To feed just one American, the industrial agricultural system requires, on average, the equivalent of 530 gallons of oil a year. The long journey from farm to consumer also has nutritional effects on the foods we consume. Fresh green beans, for example, have been shown to lose nearly 80 percent of their Vitamin C within a week of being picked.”

“One recent study of one hundred sixth-graders compared students who had participated in a hands-on, garden-based nutrition education program with two other groups: students who were taught nutrition lessons in a classroom and those who were given no nutrition education at all. The researchers found no significant difference a year later in the vegetable and fruit consumption of children without nutrition education and those who received nutrition classes. The students who received hands-on training in a garden, however, increased their fruit and vegetable intake by more than two servings a day. My own experience tells me that if we can expose young people more often to fresh, delicious food – and create positive emotions around these experiences – that we increase the chances that they will adopt more fresh food into their diet as they begin to make independent food choices later in life.”

“If we can figure out ways for more people to control the growth, marketing, and distribution of food on a local and regional level – and even to grow some food within cities – I believe we can play a part in remedying some of the problems that are troubling us as a country right now: the absence of jobs, the problems of waste, the crisis of rising energy costs, and the lack of access among low-income communities and people of color to healthy, affordable food.”

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