Movable Feast: A Socially Engaged Art & Food Project

Come check out Movable Feast next Tuesday, October 5th! They'll be parked right in front of Food For Thought Books from 4:30 to 7:00pm.

The centerpiece of the Movable Feast project is a retrofitted mobile food service trailer that serves as an advocacy tool for healthy eating, local food production and sustainability. At each of its stops, informational presentations, informal performances, and vegetarian fare are all combined to expand conventional notions of food, people, place and the potential for engaged public art to be a catalyst for change.

So, come chow down on delicious food (provided by the superlative Sierra Grille!) and find out more about how we all can create a better and healthier local food system.

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There's a good interview with Joseph Krupczynski, the artist behind Movable Feast, over at ArtSake, where he talks about the origin of the project, it's aims, & of using art as a tool for education & activism.

All those years wasted...

All Those Years Shopping At Independent Bookstore Wasted

Reacting to news that independent outfit Shaker House Books had closed Monday, longtime customer Stephanie Brear said she couldn't believe she "flushed seven years down the toilet" patronizing the local store. "I put so much time into supporting my quirky local bookshop, with its charming window displays and us-versus-the-world attitude, and for what?" said Brear, adding that she even went through the trouble of befriending the husband-and-wife owners and their cat, Ulysses....

Charles Mann Delivers a Smackdown

Just wanted to note a nice scholarly smackdown by local author & science journalist Charles Mann over at MediaIndigena.

In this guest post, author Charles C. Mann responds to Frances Widdowson’s criticism of his book,1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Widdowson delivered her critique as part of a rebuttal to Niigonwedom Sinclair’s negative review of her book, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation. As part of her rebuttal, Widdowson hotly disputed Mann’s account of the ancient Cahokia mounds site (located in what is now the US state of Illinois).

Do you just want to skip ahead to the smackdown?

The material in my book is not “exclusively based on the existence of large mounds of earth” but on decades of fine scholarship and hard work by dozens of researchers. As I said, I have not read Dr. Widdowson’s book and know little of her work. But it does not give me confidence that she is apparently willing to publish assertions that a simple Google search would have disproven.

Oh, snap!

It's that time of year again...

Textbook rush is upon us so don't be surprised to see boxes & boxes & more boxes piled up everywhere in the store. We don't have a real backroom or basement or anything so you get to see the whole process in all its transparent glory.

New students! Welcome to the valley! Returning students! Welcome back! We look forward to the life and vitality you bring to our little town. Feel free to come and hang out anytime, whether to read a book, use the free wifi, chat with a friend, or just sit and chill.

We are happy to help you with any research or projects you may be pursuing and welcome any questions you may have. Drop us an email at info@foodforthoughtbooks.com and tell us what's on your mind.

Fusion: The Synergy of Images and Words

Check out this beautiful photo essay (part 1, part 2) of people reading books all over the world...

Photographer Steve McCurry remarks: We are familiar with words describing images, but not so familiar with images describing words and the impact reading has on our lives.

via the ever superlative metafilter

Speaking of Truth and Power

The folks at underclassrising have an interesting interview with Noam Chomsky in which he discusses, among other things, his recent book Hopes & Prospects:

Your latest book is called Hopes and Prospects. What are the hopes?

The first part of the book is about South America, and in South America there are many quite hopefu developments. For the first time in 500 years, since the Conquistadors, South America is beginning to move towards some degree of independence and integration and at least facing some of its severe internal problems. The colonial structure is extreme in South America, where there is a very narrow concentration of wealth in a mostly Europeanised, sometimes white elite, surrounded by an awful tragedy and some of the worst inequality in the world, in a region that has a lot of resources and a lot of potential. Some steps are being taken to deal with this.

In the US itself there also are changes. Whether they are fast enough to overcome the major problems I don’t know, but just take Israel and Palestine. Not many years ago, if I wanted to give a talk on this I had to have police protection at a university, because the meetings would be broken up violently. I can remember when the police insisted on accompanying me and my wife back to our car after a talk at a university. That’s not completely changed, but it’s been changing over the years, and it changed radically after Gaza. Now there are enthusiastic audiences, very much engaged, very involved, very much wanting to do things.

It hasn’t affected the media, and it hasn’t affected the political class, or the intellectuals, but it’s changing around the country, and sooner or later those things do have effects. In a way it was diverted by the Obama phenomenon, because that did bring about a lot of expectations and it diverted a lot of activism. But now disillusionment has set in. If the changes continue to develop, they can eventually bring about significant change, as they did in the case of South Africa.

... read more

Diet for a Hot Planet

Anna Lappé has an article in the recent issue of Edible Pioneer Valley that's worth checking out and serves as a nice introduction to her new book Diet for a Hot Planet. If you're local, you can pick up free copies all over the Valley, or check out their free online edition.

In 2006, Henning Steinfeld and colleagues at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization published a dense 390-page report called Livestock’s Long Shadow. Get past the mind-numbing figures and you’d absorb the report’s startling conclusion: Livestock production— especially the pressure on forests for pasture and crop production and the immense waste of industrial feedlots—contributes more to global warming than every single car, truck and plane on the planet. Move over, Hummer; say hello to the hamburger.

The entire food system—from seed to plate to landfill—is responsible for an estimated one-third of the escalating greenhouse gas emissions leading us toward climate catastrophe....

Despite the overwhelming evidence about the climate toll of global industrial agriculture, most of us are missing the story. When we think about climate-change bad guys, we would probably point to BP and ExxonMobil, before naming ADM and Cargill. Most of us are also largely unaware of the potential that sustainable, small-scale farming holds to both help us survive a climate-unstable future and mitigate global warming.

This lack of conversation and consciousness of industrial agriculture’s impact as well as the potential of a sustainable food system to heal the climate prompted me to pen my new book, Diet for a Hot Planet.

...read more

Modern Day Slavery Museum

We are writing to invite you to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers' (CIW) Modern-Day Slavery Museum exhibit. The museum exhibit will be traveling around the Northeast for the next few weeks, and will be in Northampton at Pulaski Park on Main & Masonic on this upcoming Tuesday, August 10th.

The centerpiece of the museum exhibit is a box truck outfitted as a replica of the trucks used to enslave tomato pickers in a brutal 2008 case (prosecuted in federal court in 2008). The truck was developed in consultation with workers who have escaped from slavery operations, as well as leading academic authorities on labor history and the subject of forced labor. The CIW has aided the DOJ in the prosecution of 6 farmworker slavery operations, leading to the liberation of well over 1,000 workers. A federal indictment for the 8th case of farmworker slavery to happen in the past 12 years was just unsealed this month.

The truck and the accompanying multimedia exhibit look at the history of forced labor, why it continues to occur, and the solution that is being forged to pull slavery up by its roots.

Local organisational sponsors: Alliance to Develop Power (ADP Worker Center / Casa Obrera), UMASS Labor Relations and Research Center (LRRC), Food for Thought Books, C3 Northampton, Verité, Western Mass Jobs with Justice (WMJWJ), In Solidarity With Immigrants (ISWI), Center for Popular Economics (CPE), Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC), Northampton Farmer's Market (Tuesday), and the American Friends Service Commitee (AFSC).

If you are unable to catch the Modern Day Slavery Museum but are still interested in learning more about contemporary slavery in the U.S. today, please check out John Bowe's Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy for an excellent (and sobering) overview.

Calling all Carpenters & Other Handy Folk

Are you a carpenter? Maybe you know someone who is? We need some help with building some new shelves for our children's book area, as well as some tables for our sale books.

Here's the catch: it's been a super slow summer & we have little to no extra money at the moment. We can probably scrounge enough for materials but we'll only be able to offer store credit for the labor.

So, if you know someone who'd be willing to engage in this labor of love (& books!), please get in contact with us.

Email matthew@foodforthoughtbooks.com for more information. Thanks!

Nikki McClure Posters

If you've been to our store, you've no doubt noticed our love for Nikki McClure's wonderful papercut artwork. We've got a whole new crop of her poster prints in stock (only $9.00 each!), so please stop by & check them out. Guranteed to brighten up that blank piece of wall you've been wondering what to do with.

Not In My Country: A Tale of Unwanted Immigrants

Joe Sacco, author of the recent Footnotes in Gaza, observes the treatment of African migrants in his homeland of Malta in his new work: Not In My Country: A Tale of Unwanted Immigrants.

Harvey Pekar RIP

Sad news: Harvey Pekar, a pioneer of autobiographical comics, passed away last night. Harvey self-published & self-distributed his American Splendor from the mid-70s to the mid-90s, providing a raw and insightful working-class perspective on everyday life in middle America. As Harvey used to say "Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff".

Someday, please find yourself a copy of the American Splendor anthology and read the short piece "Hypothetical Quandary" - it's easily one of the best pieces of comics storytelling I've ever read.

Goodbye, Harvey. You done good.

(More on the irreplaceable Mr. Pekar from Alison Bechdel, Anthony Bourdain, & Michael Malice... and don't miss the Pekar Project at Smithmag,net, along with his 70th birthday tribute!)