Edible Action Food Activism and Alternative Economics

Hunger is up, obesity is up, food-borne illness is up, farms are lost to debt and despair; the food system fails growing numbers of people across the world every day. Yet if we adjust our lens, we see ubiquitous commitments to change: food movements and enterprises dedicated to making the world a better place to eat and to live. Food initiatives—from farmers’ markets to fair trade coffee—offer a pattern of powerful alternatives to conventional food economics, which benefit only a handful of people and corporations. Edible Action argues that food is peculiarly situated to address the ills of an unjust economic system and to mobilize people against it.

Contents

• Foreword: Beautiful Tomatoes and the Dance for Land

• Lessons from History

• Frankenfoods and the Fight to Define Nature

• Lunch with Alternative Economics

• Growth and Granola: The Story of the Organic Movement

• Rich With Others: Co-operatives and Capital in Atlantic Canada

• Hunger and Sovereignty: Strategies of Justice in the Food Security Movement

• Fair Food: Restoring Equity to the Food System

• Living by Our Food: Farmers’ Markets, Community Food Democracy and the People’s Economics