Foodtopia: Communities in Pursuit of Peace, Love, & Homegrown Food

by Margot Anne Kelley Narrated by Nicol Zanzarella

Overview

Throughout America's history as an industrial nation, sizable countercultural movements have chosen to forgo modern comforts in pursuit of a simpler life. In this illuminating alternative American history, Margot Anne Kelley details the evolution of food-centric utopian movements that were fueled by deep yearnings for unpolluted water and air, racial and gender equality, for peace, for a less consumerist lifestyle, for a sense of authenticity, for simplicity, for a healthy diet, and for a sustaining connection to the natural world.



Millennials who jettisoned cities for rural life form the core of America's current back-to-the-land movement. These young farmers helped meet surges in supplies for food when COVID-19 ravaged lives and economies, and laid bare limitations in America's industrial food supply chain.



Today, food has become an important element of the social justice movement. Food is no longer just about what we eat, but about how our food is raised and who profits along the way. Kelley looks closely at the efforts of young farmers now growing heirloom pigs, culturally appropriate foods, and newly bred vegetables, along with others working in coalitions, advocacy groups, and educational programs to extend the reach of this era's Good Food Movement.

Editorial Reviews

FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile

Nicol Zanzarella narrates crisply with a sure sense of timing that propels this wide-ranging love letter to food communitarians, back-to-the-land advocates, and those who try their hands at agriculture. Her conversational style fits the first-person memoir parts of the text, and she smoothly moves to the many historical profiles that range from Thoreau to Stuart Brand, editor of THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOG. The author hits the highlights and lowlights of utopians like Bronson Alcott (brother of Louisa May), whose Fruitlands experiment was short-lived, as was fellow Transcendentalist George Ripley’s Brook Farm. But she thoughtfully captures the countercultural yearning of the young and their desires for self-sufficiency and sustainability. She credits recent movements that range from organic crops to farming with horse-drawn tractors to this historic American impulse to live off the land. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

05/30/2022

Environmental writer Kelley (Local Treasures) puts a human face on the back-to-the-land movement with fascinating profiles of the “renegades” behind the centuries-old phenomenon. Tracing food’s function as political expression throughout history, Kelley paints in vivid detail the lives of such food pioneers as homesteader Scott Nearing, coauthor of the 1954 classic Living the Good Life, and Chez Panisse founder Alice Waters; dips into Walden Pond, Thoreau’s “utopian back-to-the-land experiment”; explores the food activism of the Diggers of 1960s San Francisco, who believed that “food should not be corporatized”; and moves to the present, examining the ways the Covid pandemic gave rise to a new crop of millennial farmers. Kelley, herself “part of a shift in the zeitgeist” when she and her husband left Boston for Maine in the 2000s, employs an earnest, occasionally poetic tone (“The air was suffused with the scents of rhubarb and Earl Grey tea”) but isn’t starry-eyed, taking pains to underscore the persistent “racial inequity in the US food system.” Whether assessing the influence of the macrobiotic diet or considering a project to repurpose a former county jail into a grain mill, she excels at drawing the big picture around human relationships to food, resulting in a satisfyingly substantive work. Farmers and foodies will savor every delectable insight. (Aug.)

From the Publisher

Insightful...empathetic...a thoughtful consideration of a topic that will have a substantial impact on our future.”
—Booklist

“A blend of history book and crystal ball...Foodtopia’s tapestry of food history refreshingly amplifies people and communities outside of the mainstream.”
—Civil Eats’ Food and Farming Book Picks for Summer 2022

“Foodtopia glides gracefully through the increasingly complex world of food, pandemic and all. An important contemporary book.”
—Mark Kurlansky, author of Salt: A World History

“Essential reading on the state of local and organic growing and eating, and a useful addition to the history of American utopianism.”
—Library Journal

“Explores historic back-to-the-land movements and how they helped today's young breakaway farmers succeed.”
—Maine Sunday Telegram

“Kelley puts a human face on the back-to-the-land movement with fascinating profiles of the ‘renegades’ behind the centuries-old phenomenon...she excels at drawing the big picture around human relationships to food, resulting in a satisfyingly substantive work. Farmers and foodies will savor every delectable insight.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Margot Anne Kelley elegantly unearths the deep roots of today's back-to-the-land movement, linking Henry David Thoreau's 19th-century essays to the 21st-century struggle for food justice. Foodtopia shows that the desire to leave the city, grow one's own food, and live more simply is almost as American an impulse as building highways and skyscrapers.”
—Jonathan Kauffman, author of Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat

“This book tastes so good—I ate the whole thing raw.”
—Mark Sundeen, author of The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life In Today's America

AudioFile

Nicol Zanzarella narrates crisply with a sure sense of timing that propels this wide-ranging love letter to food communitarians, back-to-the-land advocates, and those who try their hands at agriculture. Her conversational style fits the first-person memoir parts of the text, and she smoothly moves to the many historical profiles that range from Thoreau to Stuart Brand.

Library Journal

05/01/2022

In this book combining journalism and history, Kelley (A Field Guide to Other People's Trees) traces the philosophical and cultural movements that led to notable utopian experiments in the United States. A new generation of younger people pursuing utopian food system dreams has emerged out of food writing from the early 2000s such as Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle, and while Kelley starts here, her larger project is an examination of the desires around food of previous utopian movements in American history. She also looks at what s particularly resonant about a given landscape or natural environment. As a Maine-based writer, Kelley naturally focuses on New England, but also looks at California's hippie food movements, among others. This book makes the case that food is central to the success of utopian movements—those that assume food will take care of itself are doomed to fail. Kelley writes that wider change has also come from food systems that include mentoring and agricultural training and are deeply embedded in local cultural values and needs (e.g., the Black Panther Party's free breakfast program). VERDICT Essential reading on the state of local and organic growing and eating, and a useful addition to the history of American utopianism.—Margaret Heller

FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile

Nicol Zanzarella narrates crisply with a sure sense of timing that propels this wide-ranging love letter to food communitarians, back-to-the-land advocates, and those who try their hands at agriculture. Her conversational style fits the first-person memoir parts of the text, and she smoothly moves to the many historical profiles that range from Thoreau to Stuart Brand, editor of THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOG. The author hits the highlights and lowlights of utopians like Bronson Alcott (brother of Louisa May), whose Fruitlands experiment was short-lived, as was fellow Transcendentalist George Ripley’s Brook Farm. But she thoughtfully captures the countercultural yearning of the young and their desires for self-sufficiency and sustainability. She credits recent movements that range from organic crops to farming with horse-drawn tractors to this historic American impulse to live off the land. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2022-05-04
An educator and editor shares her appetite for health and justice.

The back-to-the-land movement associated with the 1970s is part of a long trajectory that began in the 19th century and continues in the present. Kelley, an enthusiastic vegetable gardener, looks at five periods—in the 1840s, 1900s, 1930s, 1960s, and, most recently, in the 2010s—during which similar efforts took root. “These utopian experimenters,” she writes, “have daisy-chained into being an enduring counterforce to the mainstream ethos, one that’s based on a love of freedom, equality, reciprocity—and good food.” In 1845, industrialization and “agricultural capitalism” sent Thoreau to Walden Pond. “The young freedom seeker recognized this change made farming and food production more centralized, more monopolistic, less healthful, and less conducive to freedom,” Kelley asserts. “He set out to prove that an alternative conducive to freedom was still possible.” Thoreau’s singular experiment was echoed in some 80 communities—Fruitlands and Brook Farm are two of the most well known—scattered throughout New England and the Midwest. All “sought a greater sense of freedom, equality, the abolition of slavery, and communal sufficiency.” Later, inequality of access to food, alarm about adulteration and pesticides, and the rise of supermarkets promoting canned and frozen food all inspired efforts to find viable ways to reject agribusiness. Kelley’s well-populated narrative includes Scott and Helen Nearing, whose Living the Good Life became a transformative text for many idealistic farmers; Mollie Katzen, author of The Moosewood Cookbook; and Alice Waters, who sparked a food revolution from her Berkeley restaurant. Recounting her visits to farms, conferences, and farmers markets, Kelley offers lively profiles of men and women “intimately and integrally connected to utopians who came before or after them, who inspired or affirmed them, who believed that land is a common good, that farming should be a healthful enterprise, that food should nourish bodies and spirits.”

An informative, fresh history of food in America.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175883207
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	12/13/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

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