Book Review

Excerpt from: The Town that Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food by Ben Hewitt

This is a community steeped in agrarian values and skills, and it plies those values and skills on an endowment of fertile soil.

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To engage in a local food system is to assume a level of responsibility for the very thing that keeps you alive. If you're a producer, you assume that responsibility for yourself and your customers. If you're a merchant, you assume the responsibility of connecting farmer and consumer and of ensuring that each walks away from the transaction the better for it. If you're a consumer, your primary responsibility isn't to yourself, but to the people who keep your sustenance trickling down its truncated supply chain. Which, conveniently enough, only ensures your continued survival.


Ben writes is a very no-nonsense style about the blue-collar town of Hardwick, VT and the influx of young agrepreneurs and the change to the community - both good and bad. I plan to attend a book discussion at Driftless Market next week on the book, local food and the current and potential impact on Platteville and the surrounding area.