Carolan - No One Eats Alone: Food as a Social Enterprise

No One Eats Alone was years in the making. When you work on something that long, especially on a project that takes you around the world, you become reluctant to take sole credit for whats really the product of a collaborative process. My name might appear on the books cover and spine, but many people made this book possible. Here are a few of those others who helped make this book what it is. If you enjoy the book, applaud them also. If you dont, blame me and me alone.

Bruce Wexler. Author and father-in-law extraordinaire. His encouragement and support early on taught me the artboy, is it everof writing a proposal.

Emily Davis. What can I say? Thanks! just isnt enough. Emily has given me hope about the future of the publishing industry. Emily, my editor, still edits. But even more than that: she helped craft sentences, even a few entire paragraphs. No One Eats Alone would not exist were it not for her; not as an Island Press book, anyway, and certainly not in the form it has taken. She has been a steadfast supporter of this project who refused to let it die. I am forever grateful.

James Hale. My graduate student and the person with whom I talk critical food scholarship more than with any other. Many of my ideas have been shaped by those discussions.

Mike Fleming. My copyeditor and the person who found a way to balance my desire to maintain a conversational narrative with the need to follow the by-the-book rules. Thank you for allowing me to say what I want, how I want.

Mom and Dad. Where did my interest in food come from? Right there. I grew up in a small town in rural Iowa, hometown population: 350. We had, and they still have, an acre-large garden. As children, my sister and I went around town in the summer with a wagon full of corn, selling it door-to-door. And as a family, over the summer we spent hours weeding, picking, canning, pickling, and freezing almost everything we grew. Thank you for that, even though I didnt appreciate those experiences at the time.

Nora, Elena, Joey. They put up with my highs and lows throughout the writing project. They put up with my travel, which regularly took me away from home for entire weeks at a timeNora, I really owe you on that count. I hope projects like this will give our kids (Elena and Joey) some idea of what their dad does, as I know theyll never read my peer-reviewed articles, and would never willfully expose them to such torture.

I also want to thank the following institutions and professional networks that supported this project in their own unique ways: Colorado State University (USA); Korea University (Korea); Australasian Agri-Food Research Network; Otago University (New Zealand); University of Auckland (New Zealand).

I also owe a huge debt to all those who have lent their voices to this book, from those quoted directly to those not quoted but who shaped its arguments by allowing themselves to be interviewed. As noted in the text, this debt extends to hundreds, literally. Thank you, thank you, one and all.

Parts of this project were supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (grant number COL00725) (under the title Food System Resilience along the Front Range) and by the National Research Foundation of Korea (grant number NRF-2013S1A3A2055243).