Bemidji book club

Now that the weather is turning cooler and school is back in session, the SGT Book Club is back, with not one but two books. In Minneapolis, the book club will be discussing Marion Nestle’s Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition & Health; in Bemidji, the book club will be discussing David Agus’s The End of Illness.

Meetings are open to all, whether you finish the whole book or just have fresh ideas about our food or health system that you want to discuss. So come on out and join us for a lively discussion!

Spring is just about the perfect time to be reading a book that might just inspire you to turn that little plot of unused ground into something productive. You certainly don't have to live in Oakland California, although as you find out in this excellent read, it might make it much more interesting. Of course if you are as bold a spirit as is author and urban farmer Novella Carpenter, you find your own way to make things happen, education included.

This month, the book club gets ambitious with Oran Hesterman's Fair Food: Growing a Healthy, Sustainable Food System for All. I say this because if you know anything about Hesterman and his Fair Food movement, it is no small deal. He is out to change the whole system. Well, perhaps not even change, but start over and build something new. When something is as dysfunctional as the American food system, indeed, it makes very little sense to try and fix it from within. There are times when something should just be thrown on the scrap heap...according to Hesterman, this is the time for action, our food system isn't going to fix itself.

Everytime I think about the SGT book club, one thing that amazes me is that there is always more to read. You would think that every issue about food might one day be used up, but so complicated is our relationship to food, there is a never ending stream of interesting and useful reading within our grasp. So is this month's pick, American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half Its Food (and what we can do about it) by Jonathan Bloom. 

As someone who has grown up in the midwest, the fact that the SGT bookclub is going to tackle Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds," by Claire Hope Cummings, is poignant and exciting. My family began farming in some of the richest farmland in Illinois over 100 years ago and members of my extended family still work that land. Now, it is rows upon rows of tightly packed corn and soybean, no doubt genetically modified to produce at any cost. It still makes me shudder, but I am never quite sure why. Cummings will certainly shed some light on this and perhaps my hesitancy to be proud of the farm will have roots.