The Town that Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food by Ben Hewitt.

3/5 rating. 223 pages.

Book #4 of 2022. Read January 11, 2022.

This book is all about Hardwick, VT’s drive toward a new type of local food. While it was not the most interesting book overall, it made me think about some ideas of local food that I had never really articulated as important in the push to save our agricultural system.

Just about everyone agrees that our current food and agriculture system are in shambles. But how can this shift away from the current system that is feeding America – but at the expense of obesity, real food, and (dare I say it) happiness – actually begin? Ben explores this through the small Vermont town’s experiments with the shift.

Ben did a good job of asking a lot of questions about the recent move towards agrepreneurship and a push for “local food”. While it is always assumed that the hip idea of expensive, local food (that only sometimes actually stays local) is good, it is important to explore this topic. He puts 4 necessities for a truly decentralized system that are so true, but somehow often skipped over:

1. “It must offer economic vitality to small-scale food producers.”
2. “It must be based on sunshine.”
3. “It must feed the locals.”
4. “It must be circular.”

We must actually support farms: especially the success of small ones – meaning those who farm for themselves all the way up to those who can sell outside their own region. For those of us that can, we should look to have our own gardens, maybe a few animals: goats, chickens, whatever. The food is important, but more than this, being close to the soil, having a connection to the land and growing the food we consume are all powerful ways to live a better life.

Hardwick’s agrepreneurs are looking to show the world a process for a decentralized system of agriculture, but more than the actual process, Ben offers them as an inspiration for small towns who want to make at least some of this shift.

Quotes:

“On average, every calorie that lands on your plate soaked up 11 calories of fossil-fuel energy as it was sown, grown, harvested, processed, and shipped.”

“Until very recently, our food has never been cheaper. It has also never been more corrosive to our health and environment.”

“Think about that for a second: 140 of us eat what 1 of us grows. If that doesn’t amaze you, it’s only because you’ve never tried to grow enough food for just one person, let alone 139 others.”

“Indeed, in the United States, diet-related disease has been linked to 70 percent of all deaths.”

“The global economy is crumbling at every corner and the financial system on which it is based lays in smoldering ruins. What were these things built on? Um, let’s see…oh yeah, that’s it: growth and profit. Greed. Entrepreneurialism. The four pillars of American economic might, all of which balance rather precariously on a single mast: consumerism. To think that we should maybe, consider a different way forward for our economic system – just as we must for our food system – feels, at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, like particularly sage advice.”

“‘A nation that destroys it’s soil, destroys itself,’ [Franklin] Roosevelt famously proclaimed in 1937.”

“But if you believe (and I do) that one measure of a person’s passion is his willingness to dispense with excuses and make do with whatever lot he’s been granted, then you won’t doubt that Pete Johnson is pretty damn passionate about growing vegetables.”

“How much, exactly, does a system committed to community betterment and food sovereignty need to take on the characteristics of companies based on economics and efficiency of scale in order to participate in the broader US economy and provide the financial recompense necessary to cultivate not just a healthy crop, but a new generation of farmers?”

“If you can show people that spending money locally has a positive effect, it has much greater impact than telling them that shopping at Wal-Mart is bad. Maybe it’s sexier to fight against things, but in the long term, it doesn’t work as well.”

“There is a certain irony that local government, which is most accessible, is often left to those whose interests lie in maintaining the status quo rather than searching for new ideas to address common needs.”

“I hope that as this house of frickin’ cards comes crashing down and all these people have lost their shirts investing in distant corporations, they’ll realize that investing in their neighbors is the only way we’ll survive with any shred of dignity.”

“Money does many things very well, and one of those things is to insulate us from each other. It becomes a safety net, and when we carry a safety net made of cash, we allow the one made of community to slip through our fingers.”

“[A]t some point all countries and cultures that have fallen under the spell of industrial agriculture will need to be saved by food.”

#books #bookreviews #vermont #food #farming #agriculture

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