Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin' Mamas

It's a catchy title.  But that's because the subject of the book is very relevant and catchy.
 
The author of  Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin' Mamas. is our own Mark Winne of Santa Fe, who is the Food Policy Council Director for the Community Food Security Coalition.  I know Mark through my involvement with the New Mexico Food and Agriculture Policy Council. 

And Mark has written articles and opinion pieces about nutrition, poverty and food issues for publications such as In These Times and The Albuquerque Journal.  We blogged about his earlier book Closing the Food Gap.

In his Web site, Mark Winne introduces the book in this manner:

With the advent of industrialism and its widespread application to our food supply – factory farms, genetic engineering, and agricultural chemicals – the struggle between human freedom and authority has reached a critical juncture. In spite of the rapid growth of an alternative food system – local and sustainable food production, farmers’ markets, the public’s rising food consciousness – we become more dependent everyday on industrial agriculture whose representatives insist that it is the only way to feed a hungry world.

And here's a quick overview from  City Farmer News

Winne challenges the reader to go beyond the popular rhetoric of “eat local” and instead become part of a larger movement to reclaim food sovereignty. Invoking the philosophies of great writers and thinkers including William Blake, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Winne writes about the importance of nourishing the body and the soul. The best way to do that, he writes, is by becoming connected to your food source.

The book is published and distributed by Beacon Publishers.  This is how they introduce the book.

Picture this: three long-haired college kids are unloading crates of food from the bed of a battered pick-up truck. It's parked curbside at the Androscoggin Food Co-op located in the equally battered mill town of Lewiston, Maine. The year is 1971 and these kids are, unbeknownst to them, the vanguard of the local food movement. They've spent the day rounding up goods directly from local farms and food processors, not because they're devout locavores (the word wouldn't be invented for another 35 years) but because sourcing locally was the cheapest way to get food for a co-op whose members were largely lower income. 

You get the point.

A Chance to Meet the Author

If you live in Albuquerque or Santa Fe or elsewhere in central or northern New Mexico, you are invited to interact with Mark.

Date:  Friday, October 22nd, 2010

Time:  6:00pm

Place:  Collected Works Bookstore, 202 Galisteo Street, Santa Fe, NM

He will be joined by Santa Fe Councilwoman Rosemary Romero who will converse with Winne about the industrial food system and its implications for our health, democracy, and souls. 

Winne's second book which carries the subtitle Fighting Back in the Age of Industrial Agriculture, asks if factory farms, genetically modified organisms, and mega-food and farm corporations are the best way to feed a hungry world.   

The book suggests that we are fast approaching the point where we will be forced to sacrifice our democracy and freedom in return for the industrial food system's promise to feed us.