Books>
Local Food: How to Make it Happen in Your Community: How to Unleash a Food Revolution Where You Live (Transition Guides)
Transition Books, an imprint of Green Books Search Transition Books, an imprint of Green Books by Tamzin Pinkerton and Rob Hopkins Search Tamzin Pinkerton and Rob Hopkins
Customer Reviews:
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.
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.
RELATED:
