Organizing around food can address the intersection of many critical social justice issues and transform communities. In his new book, Food Town USA: Seven Unlikely Cities That are Changing the Way We Eat, food writer Mark Winne invites readers on a tour of America’s most surprising—and inspiring—destinations in food. Through his travels from Portland, Maine to Sitka, Alaska and many places in-between, he interviews brew masters and city council members, farmers and philanthropists, tours start-up incubators and homeless shelters, and more. Throughout, Winne highlights how a healthy, sustainable fare movement is changing communities and revitalizing towns across the country that have been impacted by inequity, obesity, and the opioid epidemic.
On this episode of Locus Focus we talk with Mark about how food has become an unexpected force for change.
Mark Winne is a co-founder of a number of food and agriculture policy groups including the City of Hartford Food Policy Commission, the Connecticut Food Policy Council, End Hunger Connecticut!, and the national Community Food Security Coalition. He was an organizer and chairman of the Working Lands Alliance, a statewide coalition working to preserve Connecticut’s farmland, and is a founder of the Connecticut Farmland Trust. He currently writes, speaks, and consults extensively on community food system topics including hunger and food insecurity, local and regional agriculture, community food assessment, and food policy. His essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the Hartford Courant, the Boston Globe, The Nation, In These Times, Sierra Magazine, Orion Magazine, Successful Farming, Yes! Magazine, and numerous organizational and professional journals. He is the author of Stand Together or Starve Alone: Unity and Chaos in the U.S. Food Movement, Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty, and Food Rebels, Guerilla Gardeners, and Smart Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture.
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