Table of contents for Book Reviews - 2008

  1. What I’m Reading: The Blind Watchmaker
  2. What I’m Reading: Good Calories, Bad Calories
  3. What I’m Reading: The World Without Us
  4. What I’m Reading: In Defense of Food
  5. What I’m Reading: The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved
  6. What I’m Reading: Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal
  7. What I’m Reading: Holy Cows and Hog Heaven
  8. What I’m Reading: The Fattening Of America
  9. What I’m Reading: Wild Fermentation
  10. What I’m Reading: The Road To Immunity
  11. What I’m Reading: The Farmer And The Grill

The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved

I finished The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements by Sandor Ellix Katz last week. The gist of the book is all of the many ways used by people to remove themselves from the corporate food supply. Katz himself lives in what they call an “intentional community” with some twenty other people. They come and go as they please, inhabitants dwindling in the summer months and growing in the winter months. They grow much of their own food, raising goats, chickens, etc and growing plants. It seems like a pretty nice setup for a group of like-minded people.

Onto the topics discussed in the book. Katz really takes aim at the industrial food supply, the myriad packaged products in the stores that have pushed real food off of people’s tables. But beyond that, he also shows how in the name of “food safety,” many methods of controlling your own food supply have been outlawed. Raw milk is very difficult to come by due to laws. Baking and selling bread from your home is illegal. Farmers slaughtering their own animals is illegal. You can’t save seeds from certain plants because somewhere along the lines the government decided that seeds were patentable.

Of note on the issue of patentable seeds was the many farmers that have been sued by Monsanto for possessing some of Monsanto’s genetically modified crops amongst seeds they were saving. That wouldn’t be such an issue if these farmers had actually planted the Monsanto seeds. Instead, their crops were contaminated from neighboring fields and they were forced to pay Monsanto.

So Katz walks through some of the many ways that people are skirting the laws. From CSAs for produce to herd share programs for real milk, people are finding ways to be in control of their own food destinies. There was even a chapter on eating roadkill and freeganism. Vegetarianism (he’s not a vegetarian), factory farming, monocropping, even our water supply - all discussed in the book’s 340 pages. His rant on “free trade” was interesting. He’s a big fan of free trade, but he makes note of several inconsistencies of what is commonly called “free trade,” namely that there are so many restrictions keeping small producers and countries out of the market.

Overall, I give it a 7.5/10. There was some good information that I was unaware of, but having been reading and looking locally for my food for some time now, much of it wasn’t all that enlightening. Most of what I didn’t already know wasn’t of much consequence to me, unless I decide to stop and pick up a dead deer from the side of the road. It was a well-written, easy to read, and enjoyable book. I’m more looking forward to getting ahold of his previous book, Wild Fermentation.

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