Mark Winne

Former Keynote Speaker at CT NOFA’s Annual Meeting, Mark Winne, is an author, food activist, community organizer, and former Executive Director of the Hartford Food System.  He has over 40 years of experience with community food systems, especially local agriculture.  He recently released his second book, Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture, which has received a lot of praise.

Here’s a great video about Mark Winne.

Wayne Roberts, manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council and weekly contributor to Toronto’s NOW Magazine, recently reviewed Mark’s new book.  You can read an excerpt below.  For the full review, please visit http://wayneroberts.ca/archives/394

Mark Winne’s New Book an Organizer’s Manual for America’s Food Rebels -

By Wayne Roberts

            Looking beyond the book’s cover, Winne brings a way of looking at food issues that makes this book unique: he’s first and foremost a people person and community organizer, not a journalist, dietitian, chef, restaurant critic, academic or diet promoter. This lens on the food world accounts for most of the topics that aren’t in the book: anything related to wagging fingers at anyone but big corporations and lackey governments, or anything related to gourmet meals, specialized diets, superior French and Italian food culture, highfalutin alternative agriculture techniques – all subjects that might scare off, turn off or exclude the folks back home.  Indeed, the folks back home, ordinary people trying to deal with their everyday food problems, are the stars of the book, and the problems holding them back are at the centre of Winne’s policy diagnosis and prescriptions.  Winne’s “peoplistic” perspective makes this the first book of the last decade’s food book explosion to zero in on food and the human condition, not just food and the physical body, or food and the body politic…In my opinion, this is the book that shows American food activists – the progressive people with the best chance of communicating with the entire country -- how to use their inheritance of the great traditions of late-1800s agrarian populism. Winne’s book serves up plain American English and archetypes that stick to the ribs of a food movement properly understood as inspired by such deep and abiding traditions and values.”

To read more about Mark Winne, you can visit his website - http://www.markwinne.com/.  Be sure to check out Wayne Roberts’ website too - http://wayneroberts.ca/

If you would like to purchase Mark Winne’s new book Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture, click here.