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10th out of 41 books
—
32 voters
The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food
by
Ben Hewitt
Over the past 3 years, Hardwick, Vermont, a typical hardscrabble farming community of 3,000 residents, has jump-started its economy and redefined its self-image through a local, self-sustaining food system unlike anything else in America. Even as the recent financial downturn threatens to cripple small businesses and privately owned farms, a stunning number of food-based b...more
Hardcover, 256 pages
Published
March 16th 2010
by Rodale Books
(first published 2008)
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Hate “Big Food” and sick of shopping at the Big Y? Dream about being a locavore or an agripreneur (if that’s Greek to you, check out a Foodie dictionary)? Wish you could eat at a restaurant on Main Street, Your S.A., that gets 80% of its ingredients from sources within 15 miles? This book is for you.
It’s the story of one town that’s doing what other towns can only dream of doing. And if Ben Hewitt’s book goes as big as, say, a Michael Pollan release, then Hardwick, Vermont, will not be pleased w...more
It’s the story of one town that’s doing what other towns can only dream of doing. And if Ben Hewitt’s book goes as big as, say, a Michael Pollan release, then Hardwick, Vermont, will not be pleased w...more
If I had to sum this book up in one word, that word would be "meh". The author sets out to describe how the small Vermont community of Hardwick transformed itself from a run-down town into a local-foods hotspot. There are a few problems with this goal, which the author himself admits. First of all, the "food revolution" doesn't take place in Hardwick itself, but rather in the Hardwick area, including several nearby towns. Also, Hardwick, although certainly not the most prosperous town in the wor...more
After reading "The Town that Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food," I felt that the subtitle was a more appropriate title than the actual title. Indeed, it did not seem as though food saved the community of Hardwick, Vt. Rather food seemed to be a common thread that led to the community being revitalized.
But I digress. It's a book worthy of a read, especially if, like me, you wonder whether a true local food movement would work in the Milwaukee, Wis., area (or the area wher...more
But I digress. It's a book worthy of a read, especially if, like me, you wonder whether a true local food movement would work in the Milwaukee, Wis., area (or the area wher...more
I picked up this book because I enjoy reading about our food system and because I spend a lot of time not far from Hardwick. I do much of my food shopping at Pete's Greens, the co-op, the Hardwick farmers' market, and local farm stands. I have eaten at Claire's. I also love the Galaxy Book Store. So I was interested to read an in depth analysis of the town and the changes taking place there, and was somewhat disappointed. To be sure, it would be very difficult to write an objective piece about a...more
The Town that Food Saved tells of Hardwick, Vermont, a small town that falls on hard times with high unemployment and a low median income. As the traditional jobs dry up in Hardwick a group of young entrepreneurs come to town and imagine a revitalized economy based on local, specialty food businesses like Vermont Soy and Pete's Greens. The unusual and interesting part of this book is that Hewitt careful addresses the issues of how local is local (10miles? 100?) and when does a company get too bi...more
The Town That Food Saved struck a very personal chord with me. I grew up in a rural farming community and share the same deep respect for farmers as the author Ben Hewitt. We raised livestock, grew vegetables, maple syrup production and grew crops of hay. We understood the value of providing for yourself and your family.
Without question we have lost our way in the United States with big agriculture and corporations selling us processed foods and selling out small farmers to be replaced with fact...more
Without question we have lost our way in the United States with big agriculture and corporations selling us processed foods and selling out small farmers to be replaced with fact...more
When I read non-fiction books, I'm accustomed to two different kinds of approaches: 1) the memoir, where someone tells their insider experience with a subject (where they're expected to be biased), and 2) the journalist, where the person researches a subject and forms an opinion based on what they've found. Ben Hewitt seems to approach The Town that Food Saved from the point of view of a journalist (I believe that the book grew out of an article that he wrote for the now-defunct Gourmet magazine...more
I didn't enjoy this book. I don't need any convincing that local, decentralized food production is a better alternative than shipping produce 1,000 miles, and I was interested to read about a small town that's only a few hours from where I live in NY State. But despite a cast of very colorful characters, the book was painfully dull at times, and I didn't care for Hewitt's writing style, which is often bloated and self-indulgent.
That said, I gave The Town That Food Saved three stars because it ma...more
That said, I gave The Town That Food Saved three stars because it ma...more
This book is about Hardwick, VT, "the town that food saved". The author, Ben Hewitt, refers to Hardwick as a "beacon of hope in a world of despair". Hewitt discusses how a decentralized food system can build communities and guard them against the "vulnerability of our national food culture" (including dependence on fossil fuels and Big Ag).
Ben's four edicts of a decentralized food system:
1. It must offer economic viability to small-scale food producers.
2. It must be based on sunshine.
3. It must...more
Ben's four edicts of a decentralized food system:
1. It must offer economic viability to small-scale food producers.
2. It must be based on sunshine.
3. It must...more
The title is a bit of a misnomer: this book is less about a settled story than about a town in transition. Mr. Hewitt is a Vermont native, and he has written a unique book that deftly treads the line between engaging the personal and objectively analyzing the changes to Hardwick, VT, which has become a model for the local food movement. He makes no apologies for where he stands on the issue of food in America (local sustainability, although he dislikes that term), yet he looks at the pros and co...more
Despite the hype and media coverage surrounding this book and mostly the town that it is based around, I am an overwhelming fan of it. It's not telling any one person to be 'this way' or 'that way' or 'believe this' or that or the other thing - it paints a picture of ambition, of extreme interests and also of being wary and not buying into everything to do with the local food movement surrounding a tiny town in Northern Vermont. Where as Michael Pollan and Joel Salatin etc. are preaching to peop...more
This book picked up steam and ended up being well worth the read. There was a lot of throat clearing in the first 50 pages or so, and I would have liked to have seen more justification that the central premise is true (ie, that Hardwick, Vt is a unique experiment in redefining the local food chain) by mentioning other places that might be on a similar path. Instead, you're left to accept that the situation in Hardwick may be unique, even as the author acknowledges that he doesn't know for sure,...more
You may have never heard of Hardwick, Vermont, but they are on the cutting edge of the local food movement. Hardwick's median income was 25% below the state average and their unemployment rate was 40% higher, but in the past three years all that has changed. During the worst economic depression since the Great Depression, Hardwick has jump started it's economy with some surprising food and/or farming based businesses. Ben Hewitt calls them "agrepreneurs", younger people who are investing not onl...more
To understand the effect this book had on me, I suppose it makes sense to give some context.
After much deliberation and internal struggle, I recently made a decision to return to graduate school in California to study Community and Regional Development. I wanted to figure out the ways in which agriculture and food business can do good: create jobs, improve the physical environment, improve people's health, and promote cultural change that, among other things, may lead to more cooperation, more...more
After much deliberation and internal struggle, I recently made a decision to return to graduate school in California to study Community and Regional Development. I wanted to figure out the ways in which agriculture and food business can do good: create jobs, improve the physical environment, improve people's health, and promote cultural change that, among other things, may lead to more cooperation, more...more
The Town That Food Saved contains many insights into how one community is establishing a way of feeding itself independent of the highly developed and wasteful corporate food delivery system. One should read it for those insights on what an improved system needs to function, how start-up businesses might raise capital and, how, without a sense of community, such an attempt is worthless.
This book also contains a lot of self-conscious cornball prattle where the author attempts to sound all warm an...more
This book also contains a lot of self-conscious cornball prattle where the author attempts to sound all warm an...more
The title is a misnomer. Hardwick, VT has not been saved by food but this agricultural community has spawned some nascent organic food companies - and good for them. I enjoyed the personal stories and the exploration of some of the controversies surrounding a couple of those businesses getting some good press, such as a a 2008 NYT piece, and trying to establish themselves as community change agents to the annoyance of some of the more established organic farmers. No new local food system has yet...more
May 21, 2012
Mary
rated it
2 of 5 stars
Recommended to Mary by:
found it at the library
Shelves:
ag-food
This book is like a long conversation. Imagine you went on a 9 hour car ride with the author and he talked all about his town. The people in it mostly. That's this book. It's also about food policies in this country and how they need to change especially as we run out of oil and we're going to have to eat more locally.
He wrestled a lot with class issues. "Is the local food movement just for people with money?" he muses over and over. A good question.
The portraits of people are ok. The best one...more
He wrestled a lot with class issues. "Is the local food movement just for people with money?" he muses over and over. A good question.
The portraits of people are ok. The best one...more
Certainly, this book made me think of all the locally produced foods that come from my own community. A particular point that I found important in this book in looking at how a small town in Vermont could feed it's own, is that the large percentage of people, even in a small town, rely upon corporate mega-foods. This practice, as noted by Ben Hewitt, is a linear food production process. However, if the efforts and concentrations go into the production of food as a cyclical process, such as many...more
May 06, 2011
Judy
rated it
5 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
anyone interested in organic food, gardening, farming
Shelves:
2011-reads,
homesteading-simplicity
The author takes the reader on a journey of Hardwick, Vermont's transition from a seedy, mostly unemployed town to a quaint, mostly employed town by becoming a town known for its organic food culture.
What I Liked:
*Ben Hewitt limits his judgments about the people playing out the drama and their ideas. This is nice because he is allowing the reader to formulate their own opinions. A nice change for books about "green" topics!
* It reads almost as smooth as a fiction story. No huge concepts to grasp...more
What I Liked:
*Ben Hewitt limits his judgments about the people playing out the drama and their ideas. This is nice because he is allowing the reader to formulate their own opinions. A nice change for books about "green" topics!
* It reads almost as smooth as a fiction story. No huge concepts to grasp...more
This was a thoughtful--both sides included--account of the local food movement taking place in the town in which I hope to soon be a resident. The story caught my interest from beginning to end, largely because of my own involvement in local food, because of my connection to the town of Hardwick, and because of the strong narrative. The writing was good, but was sometimes bogged down by generic, and often unkind, descriptors of people, places, and events (for example, he compared one farmer to E...more
According to Hewitt, Americans spent 24.2% of their incomes on food compared to just 9.8% in 2007--a rediculously low amount for smething so vital to life. Furthermore in the United States food travels an average of 1500 miles from farm to table, and each kilocalorie on an American's plate required 11 kilocalories of fossil fuel to get there.
Hardwick, Vermont, population 3200 was suffering economically. With effective leadership and hard work, its residents, created a self-sustaining food syste...more
Hardwick, Vermont, population 3200 was suffering economically. With effective leadership and hard work, its residents, created a self-sustaining food syste...more
Mar 18, 2013
blue-collar mind
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Food system critics and supporters, Vermonters and their friends
Shelves:
have-read-and-will-give-away
While in Burlington, VT for a series of meetings and the NOFA-VT Winter Conference, I stopped at the Crow Bookstore to see what I could pick up for background on Vermont’s agricultural movement to understand its emergence as a “direct marketing” flag bearer for the alternative food community.
The book is focused on Hardwick, Vermont a small town (3200 pop.) 30 miles from the capitol of Montpelier and an hour or so from Burlington.
Hewitt starts slowly with the idea of exploring Hardwick's reputat...more
For both the novice and expert alike, this book is a wonderful and easy read about one small Vermont town's transition to sustainability (both economic- and ecologic-), and the development (and implementation of) of truly feeding themselves. I took away SO many inspiring ideas from this book, and Ben Hewitt is an excellent writer. It was great to compare and contrast Hardwick, VT, to my own community while reading about its push toward a decentralized food system, and I'd recommend it to anyone...more
Aug 07, 2011
Stephen
added it
an excellent little book that you should read if you are at all concerned about the precarious future of the petroleum-based industrial food system that this country has developed. The book is an inspiring investigation of down-and-out Hardwick, VT, former granite supplier to the world turned into corporate media darling for the localvore food movement. FOOD is the new ART. It is something we all need...so why are we betting our future on lettuce shipped in from CA and red grapes from Chile and...more
I was not sure if I would like this book. It is about the explosion of the local food industry in Hardwick, Vermont. I heard about it from Bountiful Brookline, an initiative in Brookline to increase food production in the town. (I found a gardening partner through them.) I was relieved to find it was not just propaganda for whole food but actually a real look at the issues surrounding production of organic, local food. One of my major concerns is the fact that poor people cannot afford such food...more
This book tackles the complexity of building a local food system that can support a community. The author honestly takes on this topic in Hardwick, VT, one town of 25,000 in the USA that's comes the closest, but still is only 10% of the way there. Author points of that currently industrial ag system consisting of farm inputs, food, transportation, retailing all travel in a linear way from distant source to the table. He searches for a system that is circular within a community. Hardwick has comp...more
First off, I did like this book, and it was interesting to hear of a little rural community coming back to life through local/food/ag/etc. That is great and amazing and inspirational and neat. However, though it is great to hear all of this, I felt the author focused so much on his little community that he came across as thinking their community was the ONLY community doing these things. I think the entire country is experiencing what this small town in Vermont is experiencing. Co-ops, seed trad...more
I expected this to have some interesting ideas and models, but to have the kind of unexamined "local food is great!" gushing of the typical magazine article that ignores the question of whether locals can actually afford to buy the stuff. I was pleased to be wrong. Despite the title and description of the book, the author recognizes that Hardwick doesn't have all the answers, questions the ways new food entrepreneurs affect communities, and goes into lengthy discussion of issues underlying our f...more
Blech. Why does everyone love this book? There are some well written "character" descriptions and a nice early history of the town but that's about it. This reads like a run-on version of what should have been a feature article-oh wait, that is what it started out as...My main criticism is that Hewitt kept setting up the Hardwick natives in contrast to the transplanted foodists/hippies/(prep-school educated trust funders?) from neighboring towns, but never really delved into their experiences an...more
This is yet another food book. I read them all the time. I really like reading about solutions to the current obesity, diabetes and food related illness. I am a bit obsessed about finding a new way to grow, produce and create a food system. This book was looking at it from the perspective of an entire community. It touched on how much of the new Ag was unattainable to poor local citizens, it did cover rethinking how we grow and produce food items. I was a bit disappointed with the idea of local...more
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Ben Hewitt writes and farms in Northern Vermont. His work has appeared in numerous national periodicals, including the New York Times Magazine, Wired, Gourmet, Discover, Skiing, Eating Well, Powder, Men's Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, Bicycling, and many others. He lives with his wife and two sons in a self-built home that is powered by a windmill and solar photovoltaic panels....more
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“We've created a system that demands almost no engagement with our food; we've wrung all the responsibility and sweat equity from the process. It's not that we're getting something for nothing - after all, we do pay for our food, and we suffer the consequences of dining from the industrial trough. But charging a package of center-cut pork chops to your Visa is a hell of a lot different than facing down the source of those chops with a .22 in one hand and a well-honed knife in the other.”
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3 people liked it
“(On producer/consumer relationship in subsistence farming) This is the sort of interconnectedness that once defined every outpost across our emerging nation. But outposts grew into towns, towns grew into cities, and cities grew into metropolises, necessitating a push into resource bases far beyond these population centers. Even as this occurred, the conveniences of modern life--electricity, indoor plumbing, the automobile--took hold, further eroding any sense of shared responsibility for the community's survival. From the standpoint of our most basic needs, we became islands unto ourselves, despite the ever-increasing population density.”
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1 person liked it
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May 18, 2012 04:34pm