by Brian Halweil

The title should perhaps be not “reclaiming” but “exploring” as it is less a discussion of how and why to reclaim “homegrown pleasures” than a description of the changes different communities around the world are making in response to an ever more global food economy.

It’s written very much like a textbook, with each chapter starting with a discussion of a particular problem with the global food economy and ending with a case study. The case studies are the most interesting, to my mind. The textbook parts are sometimes more technical than I really want. And it’s extensively endnoted, which makes me wonder if this wasn’t a thesis of some kind that ended up published.

Halweil’s discussion of what people are doing to combat the globalization of food takes him around the world. It’s these ideas that give me faith regarding the ultimate future of our food: permanent farmers markets in low-income areas; Cafe 150 on Google’s campus, which only serves food from within 150 miles; Washington state’s Burgerville, serving organic beef from Oregon and Washington-local food by season in a fast-food setting; the ad campaign in Massachusetts that made buy organic chic & cool; attempts in Norway to bring back local & traditional foods; and many many more.

Ultimately, it made me want (even more than I already did) a real urban garden. Throughout the entire book, I recalled breakfast I had at my husband’s uncle’s house in Seattle (in the city, not somewhere even suburban, let alone rural) where we had homemade raspberry scones with fresh raspberry jam from the raspberries planted along the edge of the driveway, trained to trellises above squash & strawberries. That’s the ultimate goal of local food, in my mind. Grow what you can & buy what you can’t. I have no desire, nor even the means, to raise my own cows for milk or for slaughter (although my cousin owns a dairy…). But chickens are probably within the scope of my abilities; as are zucchini, herbs, tomatoes, maybe even raspberries, lemons, and limes (fresh limes + fresh mint = summer perfection). And reading about the struggles, attempts, and solutions of people around the world are the goad I need to realize that there are things that I can do, here, in my apartment in LA. The solutions each group of people came up with started out as just one or two people doing something but turned into a local movement. I have no illusions of changing people’s actions in Burbank, but while my Urb Garden was growing, people were using it & many were sorry to see it die; my next-door-neighbor goes to farmers’ markets, now; and more and more bikes are in evidence beneath the stairs. Maybe changing one person’s actions is enough: especially if their changed actions can change one person’s & so on.

I’ll be reading this again, when I need another poke in the back.