More than twenty years ago, when Italian Carlo Petrini learned that McDonald’s wanted to erect its golden arches next to the Spanish Steps in Rome, he developed an impassioned response: he helped found the Slow Food movement. Since then, Slow Food has become a worldwide phenomenon, inspiring the likes of Alice Waters and Michael Pollan. Now, it’s time to take the work of changing the way people grow, distribute, and consume food to a new level.
On a global scale, as Petrini tells us in Terra Madre, we aren’t eating food. Food is eating us.
Large-scale industrial agriculture has run rampant and penetrated every corner of the world. The price of food is fixed by the rules of the market, which have neither concern for quality nor respect for producers. People have been forced into standardized, unnatural diets, and aggressive, chemical-based agriculture is ravaging ecosystems from the Great Plains to the Kalahari. Food has been stripped of its meaning, reduced to a mere commodity, and its mass production is contributing to injustice all over the world.
In Terra Madre, Petrini shows us a solution in the thousands of newly formed local alliances between food producers and food consumers. And he proposes expanding these alliances-connecting regional food communities around the world to promote good, clean, and fair food.
The end goal is a world in which communities are entitled to food sovereignty-allowed to choose not only what they want to grow and eat, but also how they produce and distribute it.
Terra Madre: Forging a New Global Network of Sustainable Food Communities
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Hard times aren’t just coming, they are here already. The recent economic collapse has seen millions of North Americans move from the middle class to being poor, and from poor to hungry. At the same time, the idea of eating locally is shifting from being a fringe activity for those who can afford it to an essential element of getting by. But aside from the locavores and slow foodies, who really knows how to eat outside of the supermarket and out of season? And who knows how to eat a diet based on easily stored and home preserved foods?
Independence Days tackles both the nuts and bolts of food preservation, as well as the host of broader issues tied to the creation of local diets. It includes:
- How to buy in bulk and store food on the cheap
- Techniques, from canning to dehydrating
- Tools—what you need and what you don’t
In addition, it focuses on how to live on a pantry diet year-round, how to preserve food on a community scale, and how to reduce reliance on industrial agriculture by creating vibrant local economies.
Better food, plentiful food, at a lower cost and with less energy expended: Independence Days is for all who want to build a sustainable food system and keep eating—even in hard times.
Sharon Astyk is a former academic who farms in upstate New York with her family. She is the author of Depletion and Abundance, the co-author of A Nation of Farmers, and she blogs at www.sharonastyk.com.
Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Storage & Preservation
