Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer

Title: Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer
Author: Cathy Stanton
ISBN: 9781625348050
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: 2024
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Number of Pages: 240
Condition Note: Excellent, unmarked copy with little wear and tight binding. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.
Publisher Description:

Winner of the 2025 New England Society Book Award for Specialty Titles
Winner of the 2024 Readable Feast Award for Social Consciousness
Named one of Food Tank's 20 Food Systems Reads that Will Inspire You this Summer

In a food industry shaped by the abundance, cheapness, and convenience that giant corporations can offer, small-­scale ventures struggle to survive, as anthropologist Cathy Stanton discovered when she joined the effort to save a small food co-­op in a former mill town in western Massachusetts. On the margins of the dominant system, Stanton found herself reckoning with its deep racial and class inequities, and learning that making real change requires a fierce commitment to community and a willingness to change herself as well.

Part memoir and part history lesson, Food Margins traces the tangled economic and political histories of the plantation, the factory, and the supermarket through the life of one New England town. Stanton tells a complex and compelling story of a rural community imagining and creating a viable alternative to the mainstream in a time of increasingly urgent need to build a more socially and ecologically just food system.