FOODTOPIA

An educator and editor shares her appetite for health and justice.

The back-to-the-land movement associated with the 1970s is part of a long trajectory that began in the 19th century and continues in the present. Kelley, an enthusiastic vegetable gardener, looks at five periods—in the 1840s, 1900s, 1930s, 1960s, and, most recently, in the 2010s—during which similar efforts took root. “These utopian experimenters,” she writes, “have daisy-chained into being an enduring counterforce to the mainstream ethos, one that’s based on a love of freedom, equality, reciprocity—and good food.” In 1845, industrialization and “agricultural capitalism” sent Thoreau to Walden Pond. “The young freedom seeker recognized this change made farming and food production more centralized, more monopolistic, less healthful, and less conducive to freedom,” Kelley asserts. “He set out to prove that an alternative conducive to freedom was still possible.” Thoreau’s singular experiment was echoed in some 80 communities—Fruitlands and Brook Farm are two of the most well known—scattered throughout New England and the Midwest. All “sought a greater sense of freedom, equality, the abolition of slavery, and communal sufficiency.” Later, inequality of access to food, alarm about adulteration and pesticides, and the rise of supermarkets promoting canned and frozen food all inspired efforts to find viable ways to reject agribusiness. Kelley’s well-populated narrative includes Scott and Helen Nearing, whose Living the Good Life became a transformative text for many idealistic farmers; Mollie Katzen, author of The Moosewood Cookbook; and Alice Waters, who sparked a food revolution from her Berkeley restaurant. Recounting her visits to farms, conferences, and farmers markets, Kelley offers lively profiles of men and women “intimately and integrally connected to utopians who came before or after them, who inspired or affirmed them, who believed that land is a common good, that farming should be a healthful enterprise, that food should nourish bodies and spirits.”

An informative, fresh history of food in America.