The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements »

Sandor Ellix Katz is the author of Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods (Chelsea Green, 2003) who travels widely teaching people simple fermentation techniques. A native of New York City, he now gardens, saves seeds, tends goats and chickens, and produces biodiesel from used fry oil in an off-the-grid community in the hills of Tennessee.

Food in America is cheap and abundant, yet the vast majority of it is diminished in terms of flavor and nutrition, anonymous and mysterious after being shipped thousands of miles and passing through inscrutable supply chains, and controlled by multinational corporations. In our system of globalized food commodities, convenience replaces quality and a connection to the source of our food. Most of us know almost nothing about how our food is grown or produced, where it comes from, and what health value it really has. It is food as pure corporate commodity. We all deserve much better than that.

In The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, author Sandor Ellix Katz (Wild Fermentation, Chelsea Green 2003) profiles grassroots activists who are taking on Big Food, creating meaningful alternatives, and challenging the way many Americans think about food. From community-supported local farmers, community gardeners, and seed saving activists, to underground distribution networks of contraband foods and food resources rescued from the waste stream, this book shows how ordinary people can resist the dominant system, revive community-based food production, and take direct responsibility for their own health and nutrition.

Chapter Topics Include:

* Local and Seasonal Food versus Constant Convenience Consumerism
* Seed Saving as a Political Act
* Holding Our Ground: Land and Labor Struggles
* Slow Food for Cultural Survival
* The Raw Underground
* Beware the Nutraceutical: Food and Healing
* Plant Prohibitions: Laws Against Nature
* Vegetarian Ethics and Humane Meat
* Feral Foragers: Scavenging and Recycling Food Resources
* Water: The Source of All Life

Publishers Weekly

Katz (Wild Fermentations) strives for total inclusiveness by writing about every challenge to the "chemical-driven agricultural mainstream" he can think of from the protests against genetically modified plants to the fight to legalize unpasteurized milk, with slow food, veganism and supermarket dumpster diving thrown in for good measure. But he addresses the issues in simplistic, agitprop terms, describing a world where the government collaborates with profit-driven corporations to flood the market with unnatural foods that are killing people. Even the criminalization of marijuana is characterized as an act of agricultural hegemony comparable to the Inquisition. Katz wants to challenge this state of affairs with a multicultural agrarian uprising, and writes with moving sincerity about how his own experiences on a queer-friendly commune in Tennessee have shaped his politics. He ends each chapter with a list of organizations to contact for more information, as well as several recipes that exemplify his low-tech, all-natural approach-his pesto, for example, is made from chickweed picked in the wild. At times, the calls to re-embrace mother earth and "cherish the biota in all its glorious diversity" become hyperbolic, but Katz's comprehensive reporting is sure to mobilize any reader on at least one issue. (Dec.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.