Description: Food does much more than fuel our bodies. Food helps us express care, create culture, and connect. But while food today might feed some of us, the growing, producing, packaging, and distributing is also killing us.

Trying to ‘feed the world’ is accelerating the collapse of environmental, economic, and social structures. The current “solutions” aren’t working. By blending research, insights from diverse thinkers, and lived experience, food systems educator Nicole Civita and story justice activist Michelle Auerbach make sense of sustenance.

They demonstrate that our lives depend on the relationships we make with and through food, and make the case for a much-needed cultural shift in the way we approach food.

Verdict: As Thomas Lovejoy says in the foreword, The Pandemic has changed out world. Lives have been lost. Livelihoods as well. Far too many face urgent of health and economic security, but almost all of us are reinventing our lives in one way or another.

Meeting the immediate needs of the less fortunate is obviously a priority, and a big one. But beyond those compassionate imperatives, there is also tremendous opportunity for what some people are calling a Great Reset.

This series of books , Resetting Our Future, is designed to provide pragmatic visionary ideas and stimulate a fundamental rethink of the future of humanity, nature and the economy.

In short, and as is detailed from the off, we are part of a system that is rigged to fail us! It has been rigged to fail our bodies and our communities and our planet while extracting profit from all three.

So when we talk about a food systems change, the recipe is simple: Our first job is to say no to the status quo. And this book will tell you how to do so. Then we need to make changes to system where we have the most impact.

The change itself is a readily available ingredient: Relationship. For us, relationship is an active practice of a nurturing connection and reciprocity. This is an especially powerful move when it displaces transactional behavior. Focusing on connections, and their quality, makes it easy to put our collective survival first, over our individual needs, fears and self interest.

For relationship will always help us undo the damage caused by centuries of objectification and division caused by racism, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy and all the other isms. For as we let our relationships go deep and spread wide, we experience a sense of belonging and meaning among kin.

Ok, so having said all that, you start to get a fuller picture of what to expect from this most agreeable, wholeheartedly-written, and distinctly sculptured prose, for you may well think that sustainability is ultimately an impossibility, but authors Nicole Civita and Michelle Auerbach will strive to show you a whole other thought process.

In a sidebar, I myself have been knee deep in fostering sustainable food production systems across Asia Pacific, where by 2030, the goal is to ensure sustainable food production systems and implement resilient agricultural practices that increase productivity and production; which all that will help maintain ecosystems, that strengthen capacity for adaptation to climate change, extreme weather, drought, flooding and other disasters and that progressively improve land and soil quality.

But that is in and unto itself, only one side of this book, for Resetting our Future: Feeding Each Other features its own thought provoking chapters for the reader to navigate, ones that clearly show a path for us all to do much better, create fundamental changes, the aim to create radical new entities to our current food systems.

Moreover, Resetting our Future is an informative warning of a guidebook, and one that goes a lot deeper than just showcasing that the implementation of sustainable food value chains can offer important development pathways for millions of poor households in each and every country around the world, but moreover serves to reset our human minds to become more in tune with nature, and to transform not only our food systems, but our own personal lives.

About the Authors - Michelle Auerbach MFA, Ph.D. is an activist, writer, educator, and consultant who uses trauma-informed narrative theory to support individuals, organizations, and communities in shaping change. She lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Nicole Civita, JD, LL.M. is a food systems innovator, educator, ethicist and attorney. Her approach to fostering change in and through food is grounded in systems thinking and ecological knowledge, attentive to relationships of care and reciprocity, and framed by comprehensive law and policy knowledge. She is currently the Vice President for Strategic Initiatives for Sterling College in Vermont. She lives in Berthoud, Colorado.

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