Green Reads: November
Every now and then, I discover a special book I want to share with you—so special that it deserves a solo appearance on Green Reads (where I usually feature 3-4 books). This one is important because of the significance of the topic, its collaborative creation, and its multiple formats. I hope you’ll take a careful look at it, consider it for yourself or as a gift, and—especially—recommend it to your local library, so it can be shared.
Earth to Tables Legacies:: Multimedia Food Conversations across Generations and Cultures, by Deborah Barndt, Lauren E. Baker, and Alexandra Gelis, with the Earth to Tables Legacies Collaborators
From the publisher:
This book was born out of a series of conversations by a group of collaborators committed to challenging the global food system and creating alternative, sustainable, and just alternatives. Here is what the publisher says about it:
Climate crises, a global pandemic, farmer protests, diet-related diseases—all of these are telling us that the industrial food system threatens our health and the health of the planet and deepens systemic inequities, racism, and poverty. This book tells the stories of food activists from the Americas—young and old, rural and urban, Indigenous and settler—who share a vision for food justice and food sovereignty, from earth to tables.
This visually stunning, full-color multimedia book generates rich conversations about food sovereignty through eleven photo essays and links to ten videos. Commentaries on each essay broaden the conversations with the experiences and perspectives of eighteen scholars and activists from Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Facilitator's guides offer creative ways to engage students and activists in critical discussions about these issues with links to other resources—text-based and visual, print and online.
With its accompanying online resources, Earth to Tables Legacies is an important read for anyone who is interested in how we feed ourselves and each other, how the earth feeds us, and how our global, corporate-based food systems have changed and are changing the planet itself—to our own peril. In her moving foreword, author Robin Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass) quotes a line from a poem by Joy Harjo: “The world begins at a kitchen table.” This book reminds us of just how true this is.
Supporting subscribers: I’ll be back on Monday with Senior Chronicle and a conversation about the foods we seniors remember from the 1950s and 60s.
I want to find this book. It's a timely topic because environment has impacted past generations and cultures food supply. I'm curious if that is discussed too. Thanks for telling us about it.
You mention that Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote the foreword to this book. She was recently named as the 2024 recipient of the Stone Award for Literary Achievement at Oregon State University, and will be giving a talk in May, for which they are already selling tickets. I guess I should go ahead and get it on my calendar.
I am trying to remember the specifics of a fiction book I read in the last year or so -- found it, The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson. In one part of the novel, Native American women sew seeds into the hems of their clothing when they are being forcibly relocated. People do their best to carry their traditional foods wherever they may roam.