BOOKS:
These are books that are suggested reading for those who want to find out more about why we should "buy local" and eat seasonal, locally produced or harvested food. Some titles also provide background and information on global issues such as Genetically Modified Organisms or chemical pesticides and fertilizers and Persistent Organic Pollutants that impact our health and environment and food systems around the world.

Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Available on Amazon.com
Working in his garden one day, Michael Pollan hit pay dirt in the form of an idea: do plants, he wondered, use humans as much as we use them? While the question is not entirely original, the way Pollan examines this complex coevolution by looking at the natural world from the perspective of plants is unique. The result is a fascinating and engaging look at the true nature of domestication.

Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World
Available on Amazon.com
You probably enjoy eating codfish, but reading about them? Mark Kurlansky has written a fabulous book--well worth your time--about a fish that probably has mattered more in human history than any other. The cod helped inspire the discovery and exploration of North America. It had a profound impact upon the economic development of New England and eastern Canada from the earliest times. Today, however, overfishing is a constant threat. Kurlansky sprinkles his well-written and occasionally humorous history with interesting asides on the possible origin of the word codpiece and dozens of fish recipes. Sometimes a book on an offbeat or neglected subject really makes the grade. This is one of them.

Coming Home to Eat: the Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods
www.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall01/002017.htm
Gary Paul Nabhan's experience with food permeates his life as a first-generation Lebanese American, as an avid gardener and subsistence hunter-gatherer, as an ethnobotanist preserving seed diversity, and as an activist devoted to recovering native food traditions to restore the health of Native Americans in the Southwest. To rediscover what it might mean to "know your foodshed," he spent a year trying to eat only foods grown, fished, or gathered within two hundred miles of his home-with surprising results. In Coming Home to Eat, Nabhan draws these experiences together in a book that is a culmination of his life's work-and a vibrant portrait of the essential cultural relations to the foods that truly nourish us, affirming our bonds to family, community, landscape, and season.

Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket
www.worldwatch.org/pubs/books/17/
In Eat Here, author Brian Halweil points to a surging local food movement that is rediscovering homegrown pleasures and changing the way we eat.

Fatal Harvest
www.fatalharvest.org
A book that will forever change the way we think about food. This book will inform and influence the growing public movement of activists, farmers, policymakers, and consumers who are fighting to make our food safer for ourselves and for the planet.

From the Good Earth: a Celebration of Growing Food Around the World
Available on Amazon.com
This book is a tribute to agriculture and the great diversity of practices and customs that surround it. Ableman, a California organic farmer, presents a photographic essay with 170 full-color photographs of farming practices in China, Kenya, Burundi, Italy, Peru, the American Southwest, and elsewhere. His photos include fields that rely on many different cropping practices, markets displaying an array of foods for interested buyers, urban plots, and plants grown in backyard gardens and pots. We catch a glimpse of people of all ages and many cultures involved in producing and selling food and their links with community and culture. The accompanying text offers Ableman's perspectives on the contrast between industrial agriculture, which uses heavy machinery and chemicals, and the labor-intensive, nonchemical approaches still used in most of the world. He urges us to understand the interconnections between our food, our health, our communities, and our environment for the sake of the planet's future.

Heal the Ocean
www.newsociety.com/bookid/3831
Heal the Ocean provides a refreshing change in the literature by emphasizing success stories in the struggle to save the seas. Rod Fujita -- a marine ecologist dedicated to protecting and restoring ocean ecosystems -- first describes the nature of ocean environments, and then discusses current and emerging threats, including pollution, overfishing, poor land use, deep sea mining, and the search for new energy sources.

On Good Land: the Autobiography of an Urban Farm
Available on Amazon.com
A dramatic pair of pictures opens this book: aerial shots of Fairview Gardens Farm, near Goleta, California, first in 1954, then in 1998. Once part of thousands of acres of farmland, Fairview Gardens is now entirely surrounded by tract homes, strip malls, and all the conveniences of modern suburban life. This 12.5-acre oasis exists only because Michael Ableman has steadfastly refused to let it be gobbled up by the relentless bulldozers. His story is funny, fierce, inspiring, and infuriating. His success, tempered by ample setbacks, will be of practical use to anybody seeking to preserve farmland from suburban sprawl.

Our Stolen Future
www.ourstolenfuture.org
Our Stolen Future tells the story of how endocrine disruption was discovered, how it works what it means, and how families can protect themselves and their communities, all in clear, simple language intended for a general audience.

Small Wonder
www.kingsolver.com/bookshelf/small_wonder.asp
In her new essay collection, Barbara Kingsolver brings to us, out of one of history's darker moments, an extended love song to the world we still have. Whether she is contemplating the Grand Canyon, her vegetable garden, motherhood, genetic engineering, or the future of a nation founded on the best of all human impulses, these essays are grounded in the author's belief that our largest problems have grown from the earth's remotest corners as well as our own backyards, and that answers may lie in both those places.

Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply
Available on Amazon.com
In Stolen Harvest, Vandana Shiva charts the impacts of globalized, corporate agriculture on small farmers, the environment, and the quality of the food we eat.

Sustainable Cuisine White Papers
http://chelseagreen.com/2004/items/sustainablecuisine
A small book with a large message, Sustainable Cuisine White Papers is a collection of 39 essays on the link between food quality, environmental issues and culinary traditions. An eclectic group of chefs, farmers, food writers, environmental experts and others offer food for thought that is all at once whimsical and real.

The Eco-Foods Guide
www.newsociety.com/bookid/3805
The Eco-Foods Guide is a lively conversation with consumers that takes the gloom out of our grocery choices and empowers shoppers to vote with their food dollars for the environment and for a safe future for their grandchildren. Frankenfoods and more have made food shopping so frightening and complex that the result has often been paralysis or denial. But in this optimistic and even humorous jaunt through the topic, sustainable agriculture expert Cynthia Barstow encourages readers to walk away bubbling with opportunities to buy what's best -- most of the time -- and to even engage with the many others working to effect change in agriculture.

The Farmers' Market Book
Growing Food, Cultivating Community
Jennifer Meta Robinson and J. A. Hartenfeld
Farmers' markets provide a rewarding intersection of rural and urban lives, sustaining and healing both our communities and our relationship to the land. By examining this national phenomenon through the story of the market in Bloomington, Indiana, Robinson and Hartenfield consider the social, ecological, and economic power of farmers' markets generally.

Culinary Tours:

The Hungry Passport
www.hungrypassport.com
Food and travel are an unbeatable combination, because there’s nothing like sampling the fare of another culture in that setting—whether you’re in a new country or simply in a different region of your own—to give you insight into its places and people. I hope you’ll join me on the road so that we can explore other cultures and their cuisines and come home with not only treasured memories, but an invigorated sense of what it means to be a citizen of the world.

Films:
If a picture tells a thousand stories, then maybe films are even better. Here are some films that will give you food for thought.

A Piece of the Puzzle
www.pointofviewfilms.com
A synopsis of the Ventura County Farm Worker Housing Summit (2004), this film looks at solutions to the housing crisis that are being used by different counties throughout the state of California. A companion piece to Dulanie Ellis' "Mi Casa Es Su Casa." (10 minutes)

Broken Limbs: Apples, Agriculture and the New American Farmer
www.brokenlimbs.org
Washington apple orchards are going out of business by the thousands. Guy Evans' father is losing the family farm. To discover why, Evans sets out on a journey of discovery that ultimately takes him through the global issues facing all of America's small farmers. Along the way, he discovers a new breed of farmer, and a new hope for the future of agriculture. This is a film by Jamie Howell and Guy Evans. (75 minutes)

Home Grow'n
www.pointofviewfilms.com
All across America, suburban sprawl is eating up irreplaceable farmland and natural landscapes. Ventura County is experimenting with urban growth boundaries and Smart Growth development to maintain small-town ambiance in their cities, protect world-class farmland and sustain a billion dollar agricultural industry in their beautiful, coastal California. Filmmaker Dulanie Ellis explores these issues in this intriguing film. (30 minutes)

Mi Casa Es Su Casa
www.pointofviewfilms.com
Farm workers are the "forgotten" people in our culture's food system. Living far below the poverty level economically, multiple families have to live together in order to afford housing. The need for safe and decent housing has reached a crisis in California's agricultural communities. Filmmaker Dulanie Ellis describes this important issue in this film. (17 minutes)

Sweet Soil
wildhayer@verizon.net
"Sweet Soil", a film by Laura Meister, shares the stories of four family farms, a natural foods store committed to supporting them and a community's passion for fresh, local food. Set to a toe-tapping fiddle-driven soundtrack by local musicians, in the autumnal beauty of Berkshire Hills, Massachusetts. (21 minutes)

Wild Food:

Foraging With the "Wildman"
www.wildmanstevebrill.com
Learn about edible and medicinal wild vegetables, herbs, greens, fruits, berries, nuts, seeds, and mushrooms with NYC's favorite naturalist, "Wildman" Steve Brill. Find out about his public Wild Food and Ecology tours in local parks, and the work he does with kids. Read excerpts from his books, enjoy his botanical artwork and vegetarian recipes, and find out what happened after he was arrested and handcuffed by undercover NYC park rangers for eating a dandelion in Central Park!