Ali Berlow - The Food Activist Handbook: Big & Small Things You Can Do to Help Provide Fresh, Healthy Food for Your Community

I have seen, with my own eyes, Ali transform the food ecosystem in her community through direct action and activism. With her feet planted firmly on the ground, but her vision soaring far ahead, Ali lays out the road to change with boldness, courage, and passion. Bravo, my friend!

Walter Robb, co-CEO, Whole Foods Market

Comprehensive and empowering.

Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy

Its been said that it takes a village to raise a child. And once the villagers are roused, Ali Berlow suggests, we can surely do something to eat better, more sustainably, and more humanely. This is a clarion call we would all do well to heed.

Peter Kaminsky, author of Culinary Intelligence

Ali Berlow has written an empowering guide to improving the food in our communities. In this wonderful, thought-provoking book, she lays out both big and small actions, inspiring us to get started and, with this must-have tool in our hands, to achieve success.

Corky Pollan, co-author of The Pollan Family Table

Its not enough just to eat healthy ourselves. We must all become food activists if we are to have a sustainable future. Bravo to Ali for so beautifully showing us the path forward.

Laurie David, producer of Fed Up and An Inconvenient Truth

Ali Berlow eats in a territory located between feast and famine. She lives with her husband and three sons in a kind of elaborate tree house above plots for vegetables and pens for livestock on an island off the coast of Massachusetts.

Her kitchen is at the end of a rough country road. When I walked into her home for the first time, I recognized at once our common cause: a desire to use our pots and pans to connect our families to the land and to justice, to pleasure, and to health.

Ali has watched obesity threaten to rob her of her father and food illiteracy and immersion in processed foods threaten the long-term health of her adopted son, a gifted athlete. She fought back with her fork, her farm, and her cell phone.

Hers is a food activists handbook for every eater, for every body.

Ali sticks to basics. She makes lists. She curates essential triumph and trial food stories. Names the need-to-know names. Provides a basic bibliography. In writing close to the bones of what it means to be a food activist in 21st century America, she has created an elastic handbook that can be used in a wide variety of communities and tailored to fit individual needs. She uses her particular and perhaps particularly charmed experience to create an efficient guide to moving beyond eating ethically in a single home to eating ethically in a community, even in the harshest hard-luck place.

Her handbook is an open-ended system. She presents starting points, road markers, stumbling-block breakers, and bridges to engagement. She does not prescribe or predict what the outcome of the engagement will be. Her handbook will be useful to a food activist focused on saving a family beef farm as well as to a vegan interested in urban foraging using what used to be called food stamps and is now called SNAP.

Self-improvement is an old theme in American literature, and the subgenre of idealistic, ecologically informed self-improvement handbooks is rich. The Food Activist Handbook will take its place on my shelves alongside The Whole Earth Catalog and Our Bodies, Ourselves as favorite modern classics that embolden folks to start changing their lives without being dogmatic about the exact form the change should take. These volumes reserve their zeal for the central tenets of the genre: change is possible, hope is wise, and doing is good.

The particular genius of this little volume is that it restores poetry to process. Ali recognizes there can be grace in administration, and within these pages she coaches her readers in the art of achieving administrative grace in progressive food spaces.

This is the perfect book for every experienced food activist who has ever wished to have a week or a month or a year to walk someone through the process of becoming effectively engaged in transforming Americas foodscape but cannot spare the time. Its a pocket coach that can be there when they cant be.

On behalf of all of us who want food to be safe, sufficient, and delicious; to connect us to the land and to justice; to be about, at once, in the same bite, health and deliciousness, innovation and tradition, I applaud Ali for writing a book that celebrates our diverse ways and means and common purposes.

Alice Randall, author of Soul Food Love

Find a way.

64-year-old Diana Nyads mantra during her record-breaking swim from Cuba to Florida, without a shark cage, on September 2, 2013

My mom kept a sketch of my fathers heart on a piece of scrap paper taped to the inside of a kitchen cabinet. His cardiologist drew it to explain what my fathers heart disease looked like, how his six-foot-four body was reacting to it, and what his impending heart surgery was to achieve.

By that time in his life, his mid-60s, my father was overweight, with high blood pressure and blocked arteries due to too much food, too much stress, and not enough exercise. The sketch showed how my fathers body had creatively built a circumnavigation system to deliver blood and oxygen around the blockages in his heart. The slow, inefficient system was an energy drain, but his body made it work for a while, with Western medicines help.

Despite its damaged state, my fathers body made detours and relied on them.

That is whats happening with our food system today. The heart of our system is sick, but we have created alternative systems to get people their food. And so we have an entirely separate distribution system that began as emergency food banks and is now a thin and thinning thread of food security for 40 million people. We have a federal food and farm bill and policies that make real food more expensive while subsidizing raw materials like corn, soy, and rapeseed that are turned into processed food by adding sugar, salt, fat, preservatives, and so on. Our farm bill calls whole fresh food specialty crops. Those crops include tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage, apples, and greens. It has become legal and profitable to ship chickens raised and slaughtered in the United States to China, where the meat is processed and then sent back to America as food. We allow U.S. citizens, including children, to labor unprotected in fields, planting and harvesting food that they themselves cannot eat because they cannot afford it. The 2014 poverty line for a family of four, defined by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is $23,850 and the average farmworker family ). At the same time, the local food movement, which strives to create more resilient, just, fair, and equitable systems of food production, distribution, and consumption within identified regions, remains stuck, perceived and tagged as elitist.

In a fable attributed to the Cherokee, an elder describes to his grandson a terrible fight going on inside him, a fight between two wolves. One is evil: he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is good: he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you, and inside every other person, the elder tells his grandson.