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Appetite for Change: Soulful Recipes from a North Minneapolis Kitchen
By Appetite for Change, Inc. with Beth Dooley

The dishes throughout Appetite for Change are decidedly Minnesotan. Although items like Cranberry Cream Cheese Bars may have a broad Midwestern appeal, Appetite for Change—the nonprofit behind the book—has a tighter focus. The book’s recipes were developed with a strong connection to the local community. Founded in 2011 as a social enterprise in Minneapolis’ historically Black northside, Appetite for Change uses food, youth programming, and workforce development to build health, wealth, and social change in the community.

So it’s no surprise that Appetite for Change the book is just as much about community stories as it is food. Take the Purple Rain Salad: An ode to Prince, the recipe—which combines raspberries with cabbage, radish, grapes, and more—was co-created by AFC youth and originally sold at Minnesota Twins baseball games. Eaters of all stripes, from vegans and vegetarians to committed carnivores, will discover recipes they’ll love in this book—and come away with a warm and fuzzy feeling about what’s possible in the world, too.
—Cinnamon Janzer

Transforming School Food Politics around the World
Edited by Jennifer E. Gaddis and Sarah A. Robert

School meal programs are a public good, a form of community care, and a means of advancing broader aims of justice, food sovereignty, education, environmental sustainability, and health. Or so argue university professors Jennifer Gaddis and Sarah Robert, the book’s editors. This collection of 15 essays spotlights how communities around the world are transforming school food programs—and politics—for the better.

Written by diverse voices, including youth, teachers, school food practitioners, farmers, and policymakers, the essays offer powerful examples of what could be. Japan’s holistic school meal program, for example, involves children in all aspects of the food cycle, from growing it to washing the dishes, in order to foster community spirit and an appreciation for nature and the food system. Brazil’s national requirement that 30 percent of school food ingredients be sourced from local and regional family farms helps empower and fund women agroecological producers. Meanwhile, in the U.S., Rebel Ventures puts youth at the center of innovating nutritious, enjoyable meals for Philadelphia students, while the Yum Yum Bus, the brainchild of school nutrition workers, ensures that all children who need summer meals get them in rural North Carolina.

Gaddis, an advisory board member of the National Farm to School Network, and Robert, author of School Food Politics, believe that feminist politics, which value the caring labor that goes into feeding and educating children, is essential for transforming meal programs. Additionally, they say, children must have a voice in policymaking. The book is a hopeful, informative read for anyone who seeks to change school food systems.
—Meg Wilcox

You Can’t Market Manure at Lunchtime: And Other Lessons from the Food Industry for Creating a More Sustainable Company
By Maisie Ganzler

Many, many years ago, I spent a long time covering the world of sustainable business practices. It left me with a greater understanding of the complexities of trying to make capitalism less extractive—and it also left me quite cynical about the endeavor. So I was interested to read Ganzler’s how-to book about making, achieving, and maintaining food-industry corporate sustainability goals.

Ganzler, who leads the sustainability efforts of Bon Appétit Management Company (BAMCO), knows what she’s talking about: BAMCO is recognized as a leader in sustainable food service, especially in the areas of climate-consciousness, local food, animal welfare, and worker rights. In You Can’t Market Manure, Ganzler showcases the commitments of high-profile companies like Stonyfield, Whole Foods, Clif Bar, and others, walking readers through how to best pursue corporate sustainability, set meaningful goals (and adjust when you fail), collaborate with partners and adversaries alike, and sell their company’s story.

While Marketing Manure is surely useful for sustainability leaders—and I also would have found it a priceless tool 15 years ago, when sustainability concepts and practices were fledgling—it also underscores the shortcomings of market-led sustainability. An early chapter focuses on improving chicken farming, touting the success of ambitious projects like No Antibiotics Ever and the corporate Better Chicken Commitment. At the time Ganzler wrote the book, these projects were still on a path to success, but, as we reported last month, have since taken a turn for the worse. Despite all the promises, corporate sustainability commitments will only become reality through consistent pressure and vigilance, and they all too easily devolve into mere lip service.
—Matthew Wheeland

Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement EthnographyBy David Gilbert

Along the slopes of a volcano in Indonesia, a group of Minangkabau Indigenous agricultural workers began quietly reclaiming their land in 1993, growing cinnamon trees, chilies, eggplants, and other foods on the edges of plantations. This marked the beginning of an agrarian movement chronicled by David Gilbert in Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land.

An environmental anthropologist and scholar of social movements, Gilbert meticulously traces the two-decades-long effort to reclaim land that had been violently wrested from the local community by Indonesia’s New Order regime. Now the land is marked by a gate that reads “Tanah Ulayat” (Collective Land), leading into a vibrant, shared food forest where small vegetable plots are sheltered by a canopy of trees.

Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, this book offers a vivid, intimate microhistory of the village of Casiavera, where once-landless workers and peasant farmers created “a new political agroecology.” This scholarship is a work of trust, even capturing the eco-political movement’s emotional undercurrents. “We no longer trembled with fear. No, we were not afraid anymore,” said one resident of Casiavera, recalling a blockade they formed to take back the plantations.

Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land is a profound story of what a “land back” movement can look like in practice, reaffirming the possibility that violently occupied land can be reclaimed, from Palestine to Crimea.
—Grey Moran

A Call to Farms: Reconnecting to Nature, Food, and Community in a Modern World
By Jennifer Grayson

The fragility of our food system became more prominent than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic, when supply chains struggled to stay tethered due to global trade disruptions. Six months into the pandemic, journalist Jennifer Grayson uprooted herself and her family from their home in Los Angeles and moved to Bend, Oregon, where Grayson embarked on a regenerative agriculture internship.

In A Call to Farms, Grayson highlights profiles of young farmers—from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina to central Massachusetts—working to create more sustainable farms. Underlying each profile are the effects and unique challenges farmers are facing due to a rapidly changing climate. These snapshots provide a window into a world of farming where young people are actively resisting the industrialized monocultures that dominate our landscape; their farms are often grounded in education, sustainable practices, and, above all, community.

Of her own time in Oregon, Grayson writes, “In my quest to bring my family to live with nature and connect to our food, I had forgotten an essential part of the equation: that throughout human history, neither was possible in the absence of community.”
—Nina Elkadi

Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Journey Toward Personal and Ecological Healing
By Jennifer Grenz

“To use only fragmented pieces of [Indigenous] knowledge is to admire a tree without its roots,” Nlaka’pamux ecologist turned land healer Jennifer Grenz writes in Medicine Wheel for the Planet. The book details her journey to connect head (Western science) with heart (Indigenous worldview)—the latter of which she says is the “missing puzzle piece” in our efforts to re-establish planetary health amid an ongoing climate crisis. The tome complements her work leading the University of British Columbia’s Indigenous Ecology Lab, which aims to restore natural ecosystems and reclaim food systems through community-applied traditional ecological knowledge.

A farm kid at heart, Grenz recalls how her perspective was dismissed and disparaged during her 20 years as a Pacific Northwest field researcher, when she was told time and again that she “takes her work too personally.” Instead of becoming discouraged, she doubled down on her unapologetic application of Indigenous wisdom. She encourages all of us to embrace a Native worldview, including the teachings of the medicine wheel’s four directions (as outlined in her book): the North, which draws upon the knowledge and wisdom of elders; the East, where we let go of colonial narratives and see with fresh eyes; the South, where we apply new-old worldviews to envision a way forward; and the West, where a relational approach to land reconciliation is realized. This, Grenz and other Indigenous thought leaders believe, is the only path forward.
—Kate Nelson

The Good Eater: A Vegan’s Search for the Future of FoodBy Nina Guilbeault

Nina Guilbeault admits she isn’t the first person you might expect to write about how veganism entered the mainstream. The Harvard-trained sociologist was born to a modest family in the Soviet Union. “Growing up in the rubble of the collapse, we didn’t have much choice about what to eat,” she writes. But her life changed when her beloved dedushka, or grandfather, was diagnosed with cancer and she started to research the link between diet and disease.

Thus began a global journey to research vegan movements. Guilbeault ventured to Silicon Valley to examine veganism’s transformation from a social movement to a market-based model, and inside the U.S. “vegan mafia” to grasp the millions of dollars behind it. Guilbeault’s personal journey ends up being far more nuanced and complex than she ever expected. “A book I thought would be about veganism turned out to be about the much larger quest of discovering what kind of food system I wanted to build, and how,” she writes. In the end, The Good Eater is a worthwhile examination of eating well in a food system designed for the opposite.
—Naomi Starkman

Food in a Just World: Compassionate Eating in a Time of Climate Change
By Tracey Harris and Terry Gibbs

“Is there such a thing as happy meat?” This treatise on food-system reform poses this question and many others about how political and economic forces often beyond our control shape our dietary choices. How, then, can we foster what the authors term “compassionate eating”?

Learning how food is produced is a significant step, but it’s not easy: “Opacity insulates consumers from the worst practices of food production,” the authors write. Industrialized fish, poultry, and meat processing are far removed from consumer consciousness by design—corporations spend millions lobbying lawmakers to resist transparency, and to eschew regulations that hinder maximum profit.

Another step we can take is recognizing the interconnectedness between the land and its inhabitants, and making this the focus of our decision-making. “What has become increasingly obvious to many is that all struggles for justice for human and nonhuman animals and for environmental harmony are inextricably linked,” the authors write.

Food in a Just World makes this abundantly clear, and points to a largely plant-based diet as a solution for many of our planetary ills. But without significant changes to how we govern ourselves and conduct our economies, this solution seems out of reach. This book reminds us to raise our voices and make individual choices to, as the authors say, “begin to heal ourselves and the planet and everyone on it.”
—Leorah Gavidor

Hedgelands: A Wild Wander around Britain’s Greatest Habitat [U.S. Edition]
By Christopher Hart

Hedgelands is a delightful paean to a staple of British life and a critical part of the nation’s rural ecology: the hedge. Christopher Hart takes readers through the history of the hedge, or hedgerows, as an ancient cultural artifact through to its modern role as a threatened and an unexpectedly diverse and complicated ecological wonderland. Hedgelands reflects deep curiosity about and love for a ubiquitous landscape feature. Hart speaks particularly to “conservation hedges” designed for biodiversity and located along active agricultural lands, estates, woodlands, marshes, and anywhere else human stewardship might imagine.

Conservation hedges are growing in popularity worldwide, and this text makes a passionate case for them. Britons have been using a variety of techniques to shape hedges for centuries, and some well-maintained specimens are hundreds of years old. Within a healthy hedge environment, a criss-cross of branches shelters a variety of plants, insects, mammals, and birds that live in harmony with surrounding fields: an estimated 25 percent of Britain’s mammals, for example, call hedges home. The hedge is a unique combination of built and natural environment that reflects complex co-evolution, shaping both British farming practices and the natural environment.

Hedgelands makes an urgent case for conserving the nation’s remaining hedges—only around 400,000 kilometers of hedging remain, with Hart noting that many are in poor condition, consisting of little more than “stumps”—and the loss of this quintessential British symbol could have a profound ripple effect.
—s.e. smith

The Eighth Moon: A Memoir of Belonging and RebellionBy Jennifer Kabat

Source: civileats.com