At CISA, we’ve been grappling how race, inequality, and diversity intersect with the work that we do to support local farmers and engage our local community in building a strong local food system. We know that large-scale social inequities, especially those related to race, impact who owns businesses, who does what kinds of food-related jobs, and who has access to enough food or the foods of their choice. These inequities exist alongside the challenges that farm owners in our region face as they work to stay afloat in a global food system.

CISA’s vision is a of local food system that is resilient and vibrant, and that meets the needs of everyone within it. We’ve been talking internally and with partners about the ways that CISA’s local food and farm-focused work must include work around equity and fairness, and a wider range of voices and participants, in order to realize this vision.

Enter No Table Too Small: Engaging in the Art and Attitude of Social Change, a new book by Laura Titzer. This book is written from the perspective of, and geared towards an audience of, people who are working directly in the food movement, who the author identifies as “activists, advocates, and change agents working at nonprofits, government agencies, community organizations, and for-profits.”

More than a reflection on inclusion in the food system itself, this book is a how-to manual for activists and advocates looking to work with all stakeholders, especially those who are usually left out of the conversation, to change the food system. It focuses on how to hold effective conversations and meetings, collaborate on projects, shift leadership structures, and develop a systems perspective around the work.

The book is broken into six sections, each of which explores a “capability” that Titzer posits are central to building the trust, buy-in, and efficacy of authentic working relationships, without which effective food systems change can’t happen. These capabilities are interwoven and they build on each other. They are: holding space, communications, reflection in action, cocreation, leadership, and systems thinking.

For me, the section on leadership held special interest. In the synopsis at the end of the chapter, Titzer writes, “Deep leadership begins by defining the problem and asking the right questions.” She argues that our culture’s “expert-driven” model, where we look to the top of hierarchies and established experts for guidance on what and how to change, leaves most people feeling unable to make change and silences valuable voices. The chapter lays out an alternative vision of leadership, which is based on sharing power and expertise, making space for varied perspectives, and working towards stabilization after challenging change. In this model, we can all learn to step into leadership.

For readers interested in a detailed primer on shifting the ways that the current food movement is making change, No Table Too Small offers a valuable perspective and concrete steps for beginning that shift. Much of the book felt relevant to me as a CISA staffer and to the conversations we’ve been having about equity and justice. For readers with a passing interest in local food, this book may feel too “insider baseball.”

Find more about Laura Titzer and No Table Too Small here.

Reviewed by CISA Staff

Off the bat, Uprisings is a good introduction to the local grain movement, compiling stories throughout North America of local grain producers, businesses, consumers, and grain CSAs. It has chapter-by-chapter action plans on how to take control of staple grain crops (wheat, barley, etc.), get more of them planted and consumed in your community, and great ways to incorporate whole and sprouted grains in your own diet. The how-to sections of the book are packed with easy to incorporate steps for every person in the grain chain. It has the same message most “eat local” books do, but by including some Western Massachusetts local folks, it is a local grain book worth reading.

There is a whole chapter on our very own Local Heroes, Hungry Ghost Bread, and their 2008 Little Red Hen Project. From the opening of their bakery in 2004, Jonathan Stevens and Cheryl Maffei wanted local wheat in their bread. Western Massachusetts farmers weren’t about to bet acres on an untested crop, in a region where all of the wheat processing infrastructure has disappeared. Stevens and Maffei talked with farmers, did research, and launched the Little Red Hen Project in 2008 by planting their own wheat patch in the front of the bakery and asking customers to follow suit. A success, the project taught the community about wheat growing, tested various wheat varieties that suit Western Mass soils and climate, and linked Hungry Ghost to Four Star Farms, a Northfield family farm that was looking to diversify from their turf business and is now steadily supplying local wheat to the bakery.

Other inspiring stories of communities taking back their grain producing and processing and conferences that bring farmers, millers, bakers, and researches together. Chapters on The Kootenay Grain CSA is credited for starting the first ever grain CSA in North America, a by-product of the now famous locavore book, The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating and Skowhegan, Maine’s Annual Kneading Conference, showed why local grain has slowly seeped out of farmland in many areas, what needs to happen to have it grown locally, and how groups of like minded people can organize, create and change the nature of their landscapes, communities and diets. The book also credits the work of the Heritage Grain Conservency for increasing the growing of red fife in New England, and the expansion of grain CSAs to Local Heroes, Wheatberry Bakery and the Pioneer Valley Heritage Grain CSA.

Uprisings: A Hands-On Guide to the Community Grain Revolution, was printed in 2013 and is published by New Society Publishers.

Reviewed September 2009 by Tracie Butler-Kurth, Community Membership Coordinator.

A few weeks ago, CISA had the pleasure of hosting Jill Richardson, founder of the blog La Vida Locavore, when she was in New England touting her recently published book “Recipe for America: Why Our Food System is Broken and What We can Do to Fix It.” Jill met with CISA community members during a reception at Boswell’s Books in Shelburne Falls and spoke extensively about her book during the public portion of her evening.

While the book does not reveal any startling new approaches to sustaining agriculture, Jill quickly and easily unpacks the work of Marion Nestle, Michael Pollan and others. She brings you along on the journey she took from being a “starving” graduate student to healthcare software analyst and finally to blogger and food activist. As she weaves through the complex reasons for the difficulties in tracing our food sources, Jill aptly points out that some market barriers were erected to cut competition, some naively created to protect us from bad food, and some developed in concert with our migration to urban/suburban lives.

Rather than espousing that everyone make immediate or drastic changes in their diet, Jill implores us to examine the food on our plates and consider the ramifications of knowing so little about what we are putting in our mouths. We are a health food obsessed nation, worrying about calorie counts, sodium levels, and trans fats. Yet Jill points out American waistlines continue to grow along with childhood obesity rates. For this reason, she believes that any improvements to our food system must begin with schools having access to and funding for healthy, locally grown food (preferably organic). As a society we need to re-learn how to eat. If we can make the system work for schools, we can make it work for other large-scale markets. Jill also advocates for requiring large, industrialized farms to conform to common sense regulations even if it means the food they produce will cost more. For example, she writes, “sending factory farm manure to sewage treatment plans would undoubtedly be more expensive for factory farm owners, but part of the cost of raising livestock should be the cost of properly disposing of their waste.” Once a resource that helped to build farm fertility, manure from industrial-scale operations is now a waste product-and a hazardous one, at that.

As the mother of an energetic and attention-seeking three-year old, I was glad for the book’s conversational tone and straightforward information. And meeting Jill in person helped me see past some of the book’s limitations. For example, Jill admitted that she should have included a section about the importance of cooperative grocery stores between the ones on farmers’ markets and Whole Foods Market (she has a love/hate relationship with the corporation). A feisty young woman in her late 20s, Jill’s grasp for the complex issues surrounding a sustainable food system becomes apparent the moment she opens her mouth. She talks swiftly and easily about bits and pieces of currently pending legislation, the pros and cons of each bill and its overall impact on our broken food system.

If you want to know more about how CISA’s work on the local level fits into the national scope, pick up a copy of Recipe for America (from a locally owned, independent book store, of course).

Reviewed November 2009 by Jennifer Williams, Office Manager

Given the tremendous national interest in local food and farms, it’s not surprising that some naysayers are cropping up.  And with a subtitle like “Where Locavoes Get It Wrong,” we wanted to see what author James McWilliams has to say.  McWilliams describes himself as a former locavore, but now argues that ‘buy local’ advocates “tend to assume that ‘local’ is environmentally superior and enhances community relations, as if the local setting were somehow immune from the disruptive aspects of normal market forces.”  Worse, he’s convinced that no even-handed analysis of the costs and benefits of local production and consumption exist, since “otherwise sober-minded social scientists [have donned] rose-tinted glasses.”

Like many critics of those who support local agriculture, McWilliams assumes an “all or nothing” fervor on the part of those who carry the ‘buy local’ banner.  For example, he argues for a more nuanced understanding of the environmental costs of food production and transportation.

The author does have a few valid critiques of the “eat local” movement. Early on McWilliams tries to debunk the concept of food miles, the 1500 miles that we’ve all heard about and asks what is “local”.  He argues that you can’t think that your tomato has just been transported 2,000 miles. Instead, you need to think about how many tomatoes are on the truck and calculate how many tomatoes per gallon of fuel. [2,000 tomatoes traveling 2,000 miles, using 2,000 gallons of fuel= 1 gallon of fuel/tomato.] He asserts that local produce has higher food miles since we need to take into account food buying habits. Most folks make more than one stop for their food: farm stand, farmers’ market, grocery store, orchard, etc … which add up during the week.

McWilliams’ main point of the book is that we can’t feed the global world the way we are currently producing food. How can we feed an anticipated 10 billion people scattered across the globe as the planet is running out of arable land and clean, fresh water? But he bounces back and forth in the book from how can we feed the world’s population to his opinion that the locavore vision cannot be replicated on a global scale.

While his ideas on the lack of a global food economy make a lot of sense, his problems with organic, slow food, and groups advocating local agriculture seem dispropotionate. McWilliams wonders if consumers could consistently discern the difference in a blind taste test between farmers’ market produce and Wal-Mart produce. Speaking for myself, I would like to think that I could tell the difference between a vegetable that I had just picked up from my CSA and a vegetable that had just spent a week or so traveling across the country in the back of a truck!

At the same time McWilliams claims conventional food production is ruining the planet, but locavores don’t go far enough to solve this problem. According to McWilliams, “Eating local is not, in and of itself, a viable answer to sustainable food production on a global level. What would happen to the nation’s water supply if the entire American Southwest insisted upon pre-industrial, locally produced food? What would happen, for that matter, in New Dehli, New York, Casablanca, Mexico City or Beijing? And how the hell would I get my daily fixes of wine and coffee?” He suggests that a better phrase is “Cook Efficiently” rather than “Buy Local”, but admits it’s not as catchy.

One example that he uses to debunk a global locavore movement is meat consumption — particularly grass-fed beef. . McWilliams explains that the earth needs about 67% more land than it has to raise enough grass-fed cattle to feed the world. He points out that you can get more food out of an acre of land growing vegetables than you can grazing cattle. True. But I think most rational people will agree that we should not be clear-cutting the Amazon’s rain forests to graze cattle destined for a fast food burger!

As an employee of CISA, who belongs to the Riverland Farm CSA, I have spent the past several years appreciating all that the Valley has to offer: fresh vegetables, fruit, meat, maple syrup and even local fiber to knit with. Basically, I was not impressed with this book. McWilliams does have some good points about some fairly important issues on creating a sustainable food system. Yet his anti-locavore rhetoric detracts from his goal.

Reviewed January 2010 by Margaret Christie, Special Projects Director

Eating locally, says author Amy Cotler, has “pleasure and connection at its core.” Her new book, The Locavore Way, is full of both pleasure and connection-recipes, stories from real farms and markets, and snapshots of Cotler’s own life (“my marriage vows: I cook, you clean”). It’s a small, readable volume, but provides an introduction to a wide range of topics-beginning with farmers markets and CSAs, but moving on to gardening, buying local from supermarkets, and local foods activism.

Cotler was the founding director of Berkshire Grown, CISA’s sister buy local group in the Berkshires. She’s trained chefs, home cooks, and food service professionals, and has written for a wide variety of food publications. With the Massachusetts Farm to School Project, Cotler wrote Fresh from the Farm: The Massachusetts Farm to School Cookbook. Every school district in the Commonwealth received a copy, and it’s available free on-line.

All of this experience is evident in Cotler’s new book. The prose is breezy and approachable, but doesn’t ignore the complexities and challenges of sourcing locally grown food year round. For example, Cotler suggests starting a farmers’ market if there isn’t one near you-but includes a brief discussion of the challenges of start-up markets and the value of supporting a fledging market, even if it doesn’t yet supply all the products you’d like to see. There’s lots of practical tips for people ready to move local eating from an occasional farmer’s market visit to a practice integrated into their everyday, year-round life. If you’d like a wide-ranging, solid introduction to local eating-or want to introduce a friend or relative to the idea-this book is a good place to start.

Reviewed May 2010 by Claire Turner, CISA Intern

Reading Novella Carpenter’s memoir Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer gave me a deeper understanding of the distinctions between farm communities in the city and those in the country. Novella, raised on a rural Idaho farm, seeks the culture of urban California. In her quest for a more vibrant nightlife, she never intended to leave farming behind. When she realizes the empty lot next to her Bay Area apartment will likely remain undeveloped for the foreseeable future, she seizes the opportunity. What she creates is an amalgamation of two worlds: a farm equipped with tomatoes, lettuces and the potential for melons, squash and a myriad of animals, in the middle of downtown Oakland, minutes away from fancy restaurants, art galleries and bars.

Novella captures the oddities that come with farming in the city. She feeds her animals (chickens, turkeys, rabbits and pigs) food scraps that she and her boyfriend dig out of the dumpsters around town. As she describes picking through the restaurant trash, I was saddened by the amount of food wasted and, at the same time, amused at the idea of a pig eating olive oil soaked, herb-crusted, day-old focaccia. A gourmet porker, indeed.

Novella recognizes the importance of the network of urban farmers in her region. “So when I say that I’m an urban ‘farmer’ I’m depending on other urban farmers, too. It’s only with them that our backyards and squatted gardens add up to something significant.” Perhaps this realization comes from reflections on her month-long venture into an extreme local eating challenge: 100-yards or traded from another urban farmer. The Bay Area, like the Pioneer Valley, is full of people who love getting food as locally as possible. She admits that she would have undoubtedly starved had there not been other farmers around to help her out. But there is a kind of contradiction in the way she admires the other urban farmers and, at the same time, calls herself and other locavores “freaks” for being obsessed with “knowing” their food. “No one seemed to think it was odd that a Dumpster-diving, urban pig farmer was in their midst… I was just another one of the freaks.”

Novella is less direct in her recognition of the importance of her community of neighbors to the success of her farm—and does not fully acknowledge the potential gentrifying impact that urban farming might have on her neighborhood.  One of the greatest blessings (admittedly, some would call it a curse) of a city is the immediate connection you have to your neighbors and the pride you feel for your neighborhood. There is no escaping the smells and sounds that come from your neighbors yards—you’re all in it together. So although Novella thinks of herself as the sole farmer on her block, the advice, small gestures of help, and complaints of her immediate neighbors are really what make her farm what it is.  “The Vietnamese families, the African-American teenagers, the Yemeni storekeepers, the Latino soccer player, and yes, the urban farmers—had somehow found a way to live together.” Urban farming takes skill, ingenuity, luck, a willingness to ask for help, and above all no reservations about jumping into a dumpster when the pigs start getting hungry.

iVeggieGarden is an application for iPhone, iTouch and iPad that provides a wealth of gardening information, plus the ability to track what you’ve planted.

It starts with the “Catalog,” a list of vegetable types. Select a type and you see a list of common varieties.  For example, under “Beets”, there are seven varieties. Each has a brief description, plus days to maturity, size and spacing suggestions, heirloom and pollination info, starting and transplanting dates (I’d already entered my climate zone), plus temperature, soil and pH preferences.

A real strength of this app is that you can add your own varieties. The generic information for the vegetable is carried over but can be edited. You can even attach photos, either from the iPhone’s library, or directly from the iPhone camera. I simply used the camera to take a picture of the seed packet, front and back.

To begin tracking your plantings, select a variety from the “Catalog” and add it to “My Garden.”  Enter dates for planting, sprouting, thinning, flowering and harvesting as well as free-form notes. I’ve always had good intentions of writing these dates down, but I rarely do – maybe this year, at the risk of having a very muddy iPhone, I’ll be able to do it!

There are a number of useful reference lists, including a Glossary, Diseases and Pests (with non-chemical control selections).  Individual varieties can be added to a “shopping list,” and lists of Ideas, Gems and Duds.

iVeggieGarden sells for $9.99, a bit high in the app world, but no more than the cost of a few packs of seeds and less than a good gardening book.  For more information, search iTunes or see http://www.iveggiegarden.com.  If you like to combine gardens with gadgets, it’s worth taking a look.

Reviewed September 2011 by Phil Korman, CISA Executive Director

Oran Hesterman, author of Fair Food, has been intimately involved in the sustainable food movement for decades.  There’s a lot to learn from his long view in his new book.

Oran has played many roles in the movement, from farmer to foundation officer.  He’s recently founded a new non-profit, the Fair Food Network, which works to “uphold the fundamental right to healthy, fresh, and sustainably grown food.”  Hesterman brings both a historical and contemporary view of why our present food system, a “$1 trillion economic engine,” is broken, resulting in damage to both individual and environmental health.  Perhaps most importantly, Hesterman emphasizes the importance of public policy solutions to achieve widespread impact.  He explains clearly why individual action, such as backyard gardening, is valuable but insufficient.

Hesterman is clear about what values we must bring to our food system:  ”equity, diversity, ecological integrity and economic viability.”  He provides good examples of the ways that both insiders, working within businesses and institutions, and activists, on the outside, can effect change.  At times, these insiders and outsiders are working in parallel paths or in tandem towards changing the food system.

CISA received its first grant from the Kellogg Foundation in 1993, when Hesterman co-led their Integrated Farming systems program. Later, Kellogg supported the launch of the Be a Local Hero, Buy Locally Grown®campaign, which Hesterman describes as  “the first modern-era communications campaign to encourage local purchasing as a way to support local farming.”  This story is a reminder to us all that making change is a long journey, taking time, resources and bit of luck.  Hesterman’s new book should help encourage more people to eat, celebrate and agitate for community connection and political change in our food system.

Photo of Phil Korman and Oran Hesterman by Leslie Cerier.

Reviewed June 2012 by Margaret Christie, CISA Special Projects Director

Ever have more vegetables than you know what to do with?  Want a cookbook that’s fun to read and designed to use crops that are in season together, right here in the Valley—and locally published, to boot? Leverett food writer Claire Hopley has written the book for you!

Claire Hopley has written the Amherst Bulletin’s “Food Talk” column for more than 20 years. She’s also written about food history, and both her local and her historical knowledge are evident in her new book, Valley Vegetables. Published locally by Levellers Press, the book includes a wide variety of recipes for 40 vegetables grown right here, including main and side dishes, sauces, and some preserves like pickles and chutneys. Although Hopley’s book follows no strict rules about eating or sourcing food, the recipes found here pay attention to what crops are in season together, making it easy for cooks who are sourcing much of their food from local farms. Recipes are arranged in alphabetical order, from acorn squash to zucchini, which also facilitates finding something good to do with an abundant harvest.  Some of the recipes, in fact, come from local farms—I spotted recipes from both Mary Ellen Warchol of Stockbridge Farm and Nicki Ciesluk of Ciesluk Farmstand.

Given the ready availability of recipes on-line, printed cookbooks need to be really readable in order to compete. Valley Vegetables succeeds on that score, offering an informative introduction to each vegetable and enough information about each recipe to whet your appetite. Hopley also provides interesting tidbits of historical or cultural information. For example, when Shakespeare’s Falstaff “ran up a bill for potatoes and sack,” he was eating sweet potatoes, not white ones, because sweet potatoes made the journey from the Americas to Europe earlier than white ones. He paired them with sack, or sherry, which Hopley notes is a good complement to sweet potatoes.

Occasional photographs by Hopley’s husband, Robert Hopley, offer glimpses of Valley farm stand’s and markets as well as pictures of finished dishes. My favorite shows a bumpy celeriac root next to a creamy celeriac soup in an elegant cup. I expect that I will use Hopley’s book for exactly its intended purpose:  to expand my options for creating enticing dishes using abundant, in-season vegetables from the Pioneer Valley. The book is available at Collective Copies in Amherst and Florence and online.

It can also be found at Broadside Books in Northampton, Odyssey Books in South Hadley and the Village Coop in Leverett.

Reviewed August 2008 by Claire Morenon, Program Coordinator

This time of year, when valley farms are bursting with fresh, delicious fruits and vegetables, is the perfect opportunity to enjoy heirloom tomatoes just hours off the vine and to pop blueberries straight from the bush into your mouth. It’s also the time of year that home gardeners find themselves with more veggies than they can eat, CSA members strain under the weight of their shares, and inexpensive boxes of canning tomatoes and peaches become available at farm stands and farmers’ markets. Why not think about preserving some of the summer’s bounty so you can enjoy it all year long? There are lots of ways to get started, from something as simple as throwing raw pepper slices into the freezer to more complicated projects like raspberry jam or canning tomato sauce.

Before leaping into the world of food preservation, it’s vital to have enough information to ensure safe and delicious results. “Putting Food By” is an absolutely invaluable resource for food preservers of all stripes. It contains exhaustive information on exactly what you need to do in order to freeze, can, or dry almost every fruit or vegetable that grows in the northeast. There is also ample information on smoking and salt-curing meat, advice on how to select the best equipment, and diagrams to help readers build their own root cellars. “Putting Food By” offers an unparalleled level of detail and a staggering array of options-it even outlines three preservation methods (freezing, canning, and drying) for the obscure elderberry.

The thing that really makes “Putting Food By” such a wonderful book for all preservers, though, is not the thirteen pickle recipes or the detailed drying-rack building plans. It’s the complete education that it offers about how each method of preservation works, what the pros and cons are and how to know if something is safe to eat. It’s not just a compilation of recipes and instructions. In my edition, before you even get to the recipes, there are 83 pages of information on the various types of salts and sweeteners, the relative safety of different models of canning jar lids, and detailed information on mold, bacteria, and enzymes. The instructions next to each vegetable tell you if something can be frozen but really isn’t worth the freezer space, and the section about unsafe but widely used canning methods is charmingly titled “Hair-Raisers.” “Putting Food By” is the next-best thing to having a grandparent with a lifetime of experience in the kitchen with you, guiding you through all the steps but letting you take credit for your accomplishments.