Best Books on Low-Impact Local Food Systems

Directory

Compilation and comments by Chris Smaje, author of: Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future: The Case For an Ecological Food System and Against Manufactured Foods

Full article via [1]

* The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World By Glenn Davis Stone

Why did I love this book?

I’ve been reading, thinking about, and doing food and farming for a long time, but I still found this book an eye-opener in its rigorous understanding of how we’re getting the food system so wrong globally.

We’ve been spun a line that modern petrochemical-intensive agriculture, with its supposedly scientific and efficient methods, holds the line against poverty and hunger in our populous modern world. In scholarly but readable prose, Stone’s book demolishes this idea, showing how modern industrial farming makes too many of us ill, poor, and vulnerable.

Breathing new life into the much-maligned model of the labour-intensive small ‘peasant’ or family farm, he points the way to more local and human-scale agriculture for the future.

* Meat: A Benign Extravagance By Simon Fairlie

If there were justice in this world, Simon Fairlie would be a national treasure. A life lived at the margins of polite society informs his magnum opus Meat, which is only partly about meat and livestock.

At a deeper level, it’s about what a sensible, fair, renewable, and low-impact society would look like in modern Britain – the answer in a nutshell being a society substantially of small mixed farms geared to local needs. Forensic data analysis, deep historical knowledge, a conversational style, and a rare wit combine to make this book a classic of modern agricultural writing.

* Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World By Tyson Yunkaporta

It’s easy to get caught up in the immediate issues around food, farming, and the need to transition to localism.

Yunkaporta’s book weaves them into a far larger tapestry concerning the need for renewable long-term culture. I like the way he sharpens indigenous knowledge unsentimentally into a practical tool with a purpose that’s potentially available to everyone, not a mystical cosmology available only to a few.

Endlessly thought-provoking ruminations on how to live from a local ecological base, and how modern culture disrupts us from doing so.

* Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia By Steven Stoll

Almost everywhere, there’s a local agrarian tradition in which people ingeniously figured out how to build autonomous livelihoods on their local ecological base. And almost everywhere it’s been destroyed by modern economic forces, which not only import energy and capital non-resiliently from elsewhere, but also import scorn for older rural ways once admired for their tenacity.

With a historian’s eye for detail, a storyteller’s gift for narrative, and an intensely human empathy for ordinary lives, Steven Stoll tells this story in the case of Appalachia in the United States. But the implications go much wider, and are endlessly informative for thinking through the basis of local agrarian societies worldwide today."

(https://shepherd.com/best-books/why-we-must-adopt-low-impact-local-food-systems)