FOODTOPIA Communities in Pursuit of Peace, Love, & Homegrown Food

Nicol Zanzarella narrates crisply with a sure sense of timing that propels this wide-ranging love letter to food communitarians, back-to-the-land advocates, and those who try their hands at agriculture. Her conversational style fits the first-person memoir parts of the text, and she smoothly moves to the many historical profiles that range from Thoreau to Stuart Brand, editor of THE WHOLE EARTH CATALOG. The author hits the highlights and lowlights of utopians like Bronson Alcott (brother of Louisa May), whose Fruitlands experiment was short-lived, as was fellow Transcendentalist George Ripley's Brook Farm. But she thoughtfully captures the countercultural yearning of the young and their desires for self-sufficiency and sustainability. She credits recent movements that range from organic crops to farming with horse-drawn tractors to this historic American impulse to live off the land. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine [Published: FEBRUARY 2023]