Food Margins
Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer
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Food Margins
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Narrated by:
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Cathy Stanton
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By:
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Cathy Stanton
About this listen
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.
©2024 University of Massachusetts Press (P)2024 University of Massachusetts PressCritic reviews
“In Food Margins, anthropologist Cathy Stanton delves into her own journey to help save a small food co-op in western Massachusetts. Rooted in her own experience working to keep this co-op open, Stanton explores the challenges that small businesses face in the shadow of giant corporations and the deep racial and class inequities that compound such struggles. The story of the co-op and Stanton’s efforts is rooted in the understanding that this tale is just one of many in a time when food systems are growing increasingly inequitable and unsustainable.”—Maya Deutchman, Food Tank
“Food Margins leaves the reader gripped with the question of whether [the food co-op] will survive and with a deep appreciation of what it takes to bring fresh food to the shelf.”—Amy Wu, Civil Eats
“Cathy Stanton presents a piercing, passionate, and profoundly braided account of the community’s effort to save a small food co-op.”—Julian Agyeman, coeditor of Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability