Tamzin Pinkerton and Rob Hopkins 'Local Food: How to make it Happen in Your Community'

IssueDecember 2009 - January 2010
Review by Rachel Holtom

This inspiring book draws on the practical experience of Transition Initiatives and provides all the information and inspiration needed to start a local food project. “It’s all about devising abundant, beautiful, fun and delicious food projects.”

The main part of the book is made up of all the different categories of local food projects from shared allotment and garden projects through Community Supported Agriculture Schemes to food co-operatives and school projects. Each one is presented as a “story” with helpful tips from project members.

Scattered throughout the book are highlighted entries on related topics by celebs such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall enthusing about his own landshare project. The book ends with an excellent resources section, which gives details of organisations, websites, courses and funding sources to name just a few.

All in all a brilliant source book; a must for anyone involved in local food. With The Transition Handbook making it into the Top 10 books MPs took on holiday this summer, could Local Food become favourite fireside reading for MPs this winter?

However my personal experience of local food production is summed up by a fellow Transition Towner: “It’s bitterly ironic that the route of the proposed Hastings-Bexhill link road runs right through our local Community Supported Agriculture scheme, a project that in the space of little more than a year has become a real catalyst for thought and action on sustainable food futures. A more vivid example of the clash of cultures could hardly be imagined than the prospect of the fields of collectively-tended fruit and vegetables disappearing under tarmac.”
 

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