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Dive Inside America’s Food Activism Scene

revolution will not be microwavedI love books like The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved. They stir me up and get me all fiery, and instill a lot of passion in my soul. Most of the book really just reinforces a lot of my current feelings (about food, in this case), but it’s great to be reminded of why I’m doing what I do. But what’s this book all about, anyway?

The subtitle to Sandor Katz’s book is Inside America’s Underground Food Movements. Katz exposes all levels of current food activism across the country, people’s responses to an increasingly corporate, unhealthy, and corrupt food production and distribution system that has plucked small farmers off the map, introduced increasingly unhealthy and over-processed junk foods to supermarkets, and destroyed traditional food cultures. The book explores what people are doing to eat healthy, and how people are coming together to produce and obtain good food, real food.

Katz, who lives with AIDs and considers fermented foods an important part of his healing, is a unique and passionate writer whose personal interjections make the book even more compelling.

The book explores bread clubs, CSAs, Food Not Bombs, Slow Food, cowshares, small farms, foragers, and all levels of food lovers that are blazing a trail in the realm of food activism. As he says in the introduction:

Food is among our most basic daily needs. We can get itβ€”cheaply and in great variety and abundanceβ€”at any of dozens of huge retail chain stores. We can choose from literally tens of thousands of products that have been shipped across the globe and packaged in wasteful, polluting marketing wraps: meat raised in truly gruesome conditions; produce grown with toxic chemicals; and exotic tropical specialties from places where the legacy of colonialism leaves people growing luxury export crops instead of food they can eat. Food in the supermarket is anonymous, detached from its origins, lacking history, nutrient density, and life force. It is food as pure commodity, and we need better food than that.

The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved is a powerful call to action, a call to take care of ourselves and our environment, to produce good food responsibly. There is an increasing need to do just that, and unfortunately, it gets more and more difficult over time. We must protect the people that are doing it, and shun the system of mass commodification.

If you have any interest in the way we eat, or getting involved in all the multitudes of food activism, you must read this book. Check out Wild Fermentation for more information.

Image credit: Wild Fermentation

4 comments
  1. zach

    good post. looks like a great book. would love to see all those different types of food activism brought together in one book. looks interesting

  2. Anna

    My name is Anna Lekas Miller, I work for GRITtv as their web and
    marketing intern. I just wanted to let anyone who would be interested
    know that today we will be hosting David Kirby on the show and he will
    be discussion factory farming! It will be today, 3/3 at 12 PM EST on
    http://grittv.org, and probably posted as a clip on the same website
    around 8 PM EST tonight. Embed codes for both clips and livestream are
    available via contacting GRITtv or the website!

    Enjoy! Thanks for your support!

    Anna Lekas Miller
    GRITtv Web Intern

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