The Book Group will begin meeting again in Sept. 2010 (exact dates TBA).  We will be reading “Food Fight” by Dan Imhoff to learn more about the Farm Bill!  Click here to read more about this important book and organizing resource!  Please check back or email us to find out more.

Join us for lively book and article discussions every month. We have read many amazing books on food and agricultural issues, and there is much more to learn . . . so please bring your thoughts and book suggestions! Contact bookactiongroup@gmail.com for more info.

Next Action/Study Book Group Meeting: Sept, 2010!

We will read Food Fight by Dan Imhoff – 2007, A Watershed Media book, ISBN-0-9709500-2-0!

Here are some books we read in 2009:

Food Inc.: A Participant Guide: How Industrial Food is Making Us Sicker, Fatter, and Poorer-And What You Can Do About it

Edited by Karl Weber

“Food, Inc. is guaranteed to shake up our perceptions of what we eat. This powerful documentary deconstructing the corporate food industry in America was hailed by Entertainment Weekly as “more than a terrific movie—it’s an important movie.” Aided by expert commentators such as Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, the film poses questions such as: Where has my food come from, and who has processed it? What are the giant agribusinesses and what stake do they have in maintaining the status quo of food production and consumption? How can I feed my family healthy foods affordably?“

Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front
By Joel Salatin

“Drawing upon 40 years’ experience as an ecological farmer and marketer, Joel Salatin explains with humor and passion why Americans do not have the freedom to choose the food they purchase and eat. From child labor regulations to food inspection, bureaucrats provide themselves sole discretion over what food is available in the local marketplace. Their system favors industrial, global corporate food systems and discourages community-based food commerce, resulting in homogenized selection, mediocre quality, and exposure to non-organic farming practices. Salatin’s expert insight explains why local food is expensive and difficult to find and will illuminate for the reader a deeper understanding of the industrial food complex.”

The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience

by Rob Hopkins, Richard Heinberg

“This book happily describes the British grassroots “Transition Towns” movement. Meant to be a guide and motivator, the handbook discusses how several U.K. towns are preparing for the twin threats of climate change and peak oil. Hopkins, a teacher of permaculture and natural building and a cofounder of the Transition Network, urges a community response—local sustainability made fun—in which groups grapple with issues like food, transportation, energy, building materials, and waste and even develop their own local currency. Hopkins takes our “addiction” to oil literally, and so we will read of “post-petroleum stress disorder,” and see applied addictions psychology helping to ease the townies’ withdrawal symptoms. It’s a handsome book, thoughtfully designed, which may make its message a little more palatable to oil addicts on this side of the Atlantic.”

Dirty Gold: Indigenous Alliances to End Global Resource Colonialism
By Al Gedicks

“Many people know that the resource scramble is escalating, with the age-old quest for fuel joined by new determination to secure claims to seeds and minerals. This intensified multinational assault is largely waged against resource-rich indigenous lands. In the Philippines over the last two decades alone, foreign companies have gobbled up over a quarter of the land, mostly on indigenous people’s territory.

But increased exploitation has been met with increased opposition: Indigenous peoples are fighting back. In Wisconsin, an Ojibwe tribe waged a twenty-eight-year battle against some of the world’s largest mining corporations to preserve their sacred rice beds from mining pollution—and won. In Nigeria, indigenous women successfully shut down oil production as part of their fight to preserve their subsistence farming and fishing economy.

The triumphs of such struggles have inspired similar movements in communities around the world. Dirty Gold demonstrates how these movements’ political demands have energized peasant and other non- indigenous communities. Indigenous peoples are working together to assert their sovereignty, using the language of human rights and the political might of transnational solidarity networks to challenge resource colonialism and environmental racism.”

Shafted: Free Trade and America’s Working Poor
by Christine Ahn (Editor), Dennis Kucinich (Foreword by), Anuradha
Mittal (Introduction)

“NAFTA. The WTO. Trade agreements are supposed to benefit us all. Instead, in the decade since they’ve been in effect, life has become much worse for millions of working Americans. In Shafted, working people-family farmers and farm workers, fishermen and seamstresses-describe the ruin free trade has brought to them, their families, and their towns. These aren’t theorists; these are the voices of experience. And they’re telling us, clearly and eloquently, that it’s time to stop the madness that enriches a few corporations at the cost of justice, human rights, community, family, and the dignity of work and of workers.”

Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis by Vandana Shiva

“A must-read for anyone who takes the future of the planet seriously, Soil Not Oil dares us to imagine a world where people matter more than profits. With Soil Not Oil, Vandana Shiva brilliantly reveals what connects humanity’s most urgent crises—food insecurity, peak oil, and climate change—and why any attempt to solve one without addressing the others will get us nowhere. Condemning industrial biofuels and agriculture as recipes for ecological and economic disaster, Shiva champions the small independent farm instead. With millions hungry and the earth’s future at peril, only sustainable, biologically diverse farms that are more resistant to disease, drought, and flood can both feed and safeguard the world for generations to come. Bold and visionary, Soil Not Oil calls for a return to sound agricultural principles—and a world based on self-organization, community, and environmental justice.”

Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World

by Mike Davis

“Immanuel Wallerstein says it best: “A major contribution to understanding how capitalists used the vagaries of the climate to create underdevelopment in the late-nineteenth-century world.” An intense, depressing, but extremely important read.”

Our Past Reads Include:

The Earth Knows My Name, by Patricia Klindienst

A collection of immigrants’ agricultural narratives, this book intertwines history, politics, and beautiful descriptive prose to explore the ways in which identity is preserved and nurtured through farming.

Stuffed and Starved, by Raj Patel

For more of Raj Patel’s radical analyses of the global food system, check out his website and blog at http://www.stuffedandstarved.org/drupal/frontpage

The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

A brilliant and at times infuriating dissection of four meals, from different production philosophies and paradigms. Pollan explores the ethical, environmental, and social consequences that occur in each of these food chains. Named one of the 10 best books of 2006 by The New York Times.

The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, by Sandor Katz

Discusses the myriad movements that resist corporate-driven industrial agriculture, including protests against genetically modified plants, the fight to legalize unpasteurized milk, slow food, veganism and supermarket dumpster diving. Includes lists of organizations to contact and recipes.