Moving through the diverse nooks and crannies of Quabbin Harvest, a food cooperative in the once-thriving mill town of Orange, Massachusetts, Cathy Stanton traces “a localized story that incorporates the interwoven and always global trajectories of the plantation, the factory, and the supermarket, those essential building blocks of the modern food system” (p. 8). Similar to her previous book, The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City, Stanton narrates the postindustrial town to offer novel contributions to the study of food.
In Food Margins: Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer, Stanton offers a profound meditation on the American food system through her unexpected journey of becoming a co-op grocery store operator. Initially conceived as a volunteer project for a challenged and “scrappy” food co-op, Stanton develops this endeavor into examining how market economics significantly distort people’s relationships with food. Food becomes the “obvious place to act from, something...
University of California Press