The Town that Food Saved - Ben Hewitt - Part 1

The Town that Food Saved - Ben Hewitt

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 68

  March 9, 2017 

Book 21 - The Town that Food Saved
by Ben Hewitt (2009)
 Part 1 - pages 1-240
Reading Time - 5 hours

I had read one of Ben's books a few weeks ago and the title of this one caught my eye as it looked interesting. "How one Community found Vitality in Local Food".

It's an interesting read... that's for sure. It tells the tale of Hardwick, VT (population 3200), a former granite-mining town that slumped back in the 1930s. Local dairy farms carried the day for many years and then the hippies bought up the farms in the 1960s and 1970s and started small scale hobby farms. Today, there are all sorts of agripreneurs, young people who are producing artisanal products (think expensive cheeses and breads). Those products are sold in places like Boston and New York. The question the author asks is... with such a vibrant agricultural community, can the local population actually be fed by it? It's a question, ultimately, without an answer. Which, for me, made the book kind of frustrating.

Is it worth a read, for sure. Can we find similar situations here in Canada? For sure. I think of Salt Spring Island and Vancouver Island. We too have small scale farms that are trying to eke out a living. But we're back to the problem that we North Americans spend 9% of our income on food, the lowest of almost any country in history. Europeans spend 25% of their income on food. We are "blessed" with cheap food courtesy of the agri-industrial complex. But it means small-scale farmers can't really make a living and are forced to upscale their products into value-added products which then put them out of the reach of the locals. Kind of a vicious cycle.