Product Description

'Local Food' is an inspirational and practical guide for creating local food initiatives showing how we can restore and establish community networks to generate healthy, locally produced food. Many people already buy their vegetables as locally as possible, eat organic and seasonal food when they can, and may even be getting to grips with managing an allotment. But with current economic pressures and mounting concerns about climate change and peak oil, there is a growing feeling that we need to do more to reduce dependence on the global food market. Local Food offers an inspiring and practical guide to what can be achieved if you get together with the people on your street or in your village, town or city. It explores a huge range of initiatives for rebuilding a diverse, resilient local food network including community gardens, farmers markets, Community Supported Agriculture schemes and projects in schools and includes all the information you will need to get ideas off the ground. Drawing on the practical experience of Transition initiatives and other community projects around the world, Local Food demonstrates the power of working collaboratively. In today s culture of supermarkets and food miles, an explosion of activity at community level is urgently needed. This book is the ideal place to start.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15550 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Review
This book is a serious hands-on guide that can empower us all towards local self-sufficiency and sustainability of our food systems. --Rosie Boycott, Chair of London Food

If you are inspired as I am by the Transition idea and believe that real change happens from the ground up, start with food and read this book. --Patrick Holden CBE, Director, Soil Association

From the Back Cover
Local Food is an inspirational and practical guide for creating local food initiatives - showing how we can restore and establish community networks to generate healthy, locally produced food.
Many people already buy their vegetables as locally as possible, eat organic and seasonal food when they can, and may even be getting to grips with managing an allotment. But with current economic pressures and mounting concerns about climate change and peak oil, there is a growing feeling that we need to do more to reduce dependence on the global food market.
Local Food offers an inspiring and practical guide to what can be achieved if you get together with the people on your street or in your village, town or city. It explores a huge range of initiatives for rebuilding a diverse, resilient local food network - including community gardens, farmers' markets, Community Supported Agriculture schemes and projects in schools - and includes all the information you will need to get ideas off the ground.
Drawing on the practical experience of Transition initiatives and other community projects around the world, Local Food demonstrates the power of working collaboratively. In today's culture of supermarkets and food miles, an explosion of activity at community level is urgently needed. This book is the ideal place to start.

About the Author
Tamzin Pinkerton has an academic background in Social Anthropology and Human Rights, and was involved in setting up some of the early projects of the first Transition Town, Totnes. She is passionate about the importance of local, organic food. This book is part of her exploration into how, as community members, we can learn to shape our food culture. Rob Hopkins is co-founder of the growing Transition Network and author of the best-selling The Transition Handbook. He is a lobbyist and national campaigner who is raising awareness of our need to build resilient communities in the face of peak oil and climate change. In June 2009 he won the Observer Ethical Award for Grassroots Campaigner.

Customer Reviews

What would you do if the supermarket ran out of food tomorrow?
We're not going to run out of oil any time soon, but when production reaches its physical peak (and signs suggest we're pretty much there) demand will outstrip supply. Any economist will tell you what happens next; steeply rising prices. Unfortunately our entire global food system is dependent on having an abundant supply of cheap fossil fuel for everything from fertilizer production to transport. It's potentially catastrophic, so small wonder no politician wants to be the one to break the bad news.

Take a look at the economics of food supply and it's clear that the future of food will be largely organic, small scale, and local. But how do you even make a start at reinvigorating your local food economy? Local Food provides a basic introduction to a wide variety of local projects that anyone can tackle, each followed by case studies and some valuable hints provided by people who have made a success of their own schemes.

It is in the meticulously-prepared resources and reference sections, however, that the book's true value lies. Anyone wanting to get a local food project off the ground will find that much of the basic research has been done for them, and some of the common pratfalls laid out to avoid. I wish I'd had a copy of this book when I launched our local food co-operative 18 months ago. An invaluable book for anyone who wants to do more than sit on their hands.

all the information you need to get started in local food
Local food does what it says on the cover - it sets out all the principles and ideas you'll need to set up local food projects in the place where you live, from garden sharing and allotments to community orchards and co-ops.

There's a brief introduction explaining why local food is important, and then the book cuts straight to the practical bit. Each chapter introduces a concept or type of project, and then gives two or three real life examples, simply telling the story of what people tried to do, how they did it, and how it worked out. Each section then closes with tips for setting up your own project, contributed by people who have already done it.

Full of ingenious ideas, Local Food is a great source book for generating new projects, and it should also be a useful reference. There are lots of further sources of information listed at the back, including funding bodies.

All in all, Local Food is practical, inspiring, and while it never pretends that food projects are easy to set up and run, it does make them sound very worthwhile, very rewarding, and very possible.

Almost there
I think this is a wonderful book. It contains everything you ever wanted to know about how to go about setting up a variety of community-based schemes around the theme of localising our food supplies. Whether it is a symbolic planting of a couple of apple trees in your street or something as complex as a fully fledged Community Supported Agriculture scheme, this book will inform, educate and inspire.

Yet, for me, it has one fatal flaw. It doesn't speak to everyone. It will not appeal to those who cannot, for whatever reason, get involved in a CSA, those who have no time for guerrilla gardening or those who still believe that Waitrose is a `local' supermarket. Any book on the subject of `local food,' produced by the Transition movement, should be inclusive. It should enfold us all, but I feel this book does not, and here we see another spot of tarnish on the halo of this noble movement.

Despite Transition's caveats and `cheerful disclaimer', it is in danger of falling into the same eco-chic trap that has ensnared the Slow Food movement. Although Rob Hopkins' original vision is stunning in its simplicity and its desire to be inclusive, and the concept has at its heart a self-destruct button for the steering groups that float each new `initiative,' it seems that most Transition groups cannot shake off their initiators. It appears to be all too easy for a new initiative to be `run' by its organisers. This book will not help to counteract this `committee' effect, rather it will have a tendency to entrench it, being read only by those to whom such projects are tangible or, at the very least, aspirational. It will not be read by those who most need help in understanding the true issues surrounding our globalised food system, those whose contribution could be powerful if only they were shown why and how they can be involved in the change without necessarily being part of a project.