FoodWISE....Whole, Informed, Sustainable, Experienced

I wrote my new book, FoodWISE (out in October, 2019 with North Atlantic Books), in Dornach, Switzerland these past 6 months. Immersed in a landscape -- both physical and cultural -- of immense beauty. Some of that beauty can be seen in the images below. There, I was duly inspired to produce the two drafts that now comprise FoodWISE: A Whole Systems Guide to Sustainable and Delicious Food Choices. And what's the key word here? Choices. Do you agree?

And so begins, FoodWISE, the narrative:

Some nights, I sit down at my dining table and wonder at the journey of the meal in front of me. Here’s the fork entering my mouth, there’s the kitchen where I prepared all this food. Before that was the store where I selected the ingredients, the trucks that brought the food to the store from the farms. The farms where people planted, watered, tended, and harvested from the soil itself.

Every bite I take connects me to the great agricultural web of sun, soil and seed, distributors and sellers, buyers and eaters. That web is a metaphor for the wider network within which we make our food choices. Each of the slender threads is interdependent. Take a spider’s web: its high surface tension allows it to withstand many natural forces, but one broken thread – a major highway used for food transport floods, trade policy that supports foreign imports of milk -- can make it all collapse.We are all part of that web, connected to agriculture, because we eat.

And the beauty, which was so inspiring to me, in Switzerland, begins with my office, and then the short hike from there: 

https://photos.app.goo.gl/n22nZhnCYw58EaseA