Just in case you were thinking I took the summer off, let this post assure you that I’m still kicking. The astute among you, however, may gauge my temporary absence as something more than choosing beach diversion over writing immersion. And you’d be right. No, I’m not...

A note to my readers: Writing this post during the high light of summer felt almost out of place against the gloominess that has enveloped us over the last few weeks. Not wanting to succumb to the darkness, however, I persevered because it’s a story about people and a...

The Community Food Projects (CFP) grant program is to the U. S. Department of Agriculture what one tomato seed is to a large garden. It may not look like much in the palm of your hand, but when handled properly, it’s a mighty force for community food system change....

“We must cultivate our garden.” Voltaire The crack of the bat. The soft shoosh of the shovel blade sliding into the yielding earth. The satisfying humpf of a baseball smacking a leather mitt. Coming out of its winter hibernation, the wheelbarrow squeaks its way across...

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." Francis Bacon, 17th Century English philosopher Shelves stuffed with books are supposed to be a symbol of their owner’s intelligence, culture, and a certain savoir faire....

I grew up under the sway of Zionist ideology.  Like a similar ideology that underpinned my 1950s and 1960s American history lessons, Zionism presented a virtuous cause framed by a tale of divine destiny that was forged in a cauldron of suffering and activated by a...

Arizona has a special place in my heart because it’s the only state from which I was ever banned, albeit temporarily. I had been invited to address a statewide food summit in the Spring of 2017 on the topic of food security. Having gratefully accepted the offer and...

“We must hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”  Ben Franklin When I wrote Stand Together or Starve Alone in 2018, I chose Ben Franklin’s famous admonition to his compatriots as my epigram because it stood for what I felt was both wrong and...

(All italicized sections are conversations held with or overheard by the author at the Shed Bar between 2018 and the present) It was just another night at The Shed’s bar. Two older women from Texas were laughing hard and belting back margaritas harder, a Black and...

Yes, I’m from New Jersey. After years of therapy, I now proudly and openly embrace the place of my birth and coming of age, both for its physical attributes as well as its hard-earned state of mind. With that acceptance, of course, comes an acknowledgement of its...

(This is the second part of my two-part series on West Virginia) “To come here originally as a volunteer was like stepping into a new world…I don’t want to just grow food for myself; I want to grow for my neighbor so they can see you don’t have to settle for Walmart.”...

Almost Heaven, West Virginia Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River Life is old there, older than the trees Younger than the mountains, growing like a breeze Country roads, take me home To the place I belong West Virginia, mountain mama Take me home, country roads. No...

…Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out And to whom I was like to give offense. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down. “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost Laredo, Texas is one of the more unique cities I have...

(This is the second in a two-part series that looks through a food lens at two New Jersey towns—Paterson and Ridgewood—that are only a few miles apart geographically, but light years apart socio-economically. Part I focused primarily on Paterson, while Part II will...

How do I tell an accurate story about places that are embedded in my subjectivity? On the surface it’s a food story because that’s nearly all I know, but it’s also a personal story rooted in the memory of my agitated youth. Decades of experience and reflections have...

Childhood obesity is very much in the news these days, as well as it should be. Reflecting back over several decades of work in the community food field, it feels incomprehensible to me that one in five American children now (compared to one in twenty in 1980) fall...

I was the only one in line for honey that morning at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market. I found out why when I asked the young lady whose long braids were the same color as the stacked honey jars, how much for a quart. “$30,” was her reply. Stung by her answer, I replied,...

I remember my first nonprofit board of directors (BOD) meeting like it was yesterday—such is the power of trauma to send its shock waves across decades. I was 28, newly arrived with my young family in Hartford, Connecticut, to take the reins of a brand-new food...

Finally pulling out of the steep dive that was COVID-19, do we dare ask ourselves if we’re healthier, wealthier, and wiser? Fortunately for me, the only lingering effect has been the Zoomacron variant that has tenaciously kept us enthrall to technology and seems...

I have wandered the countryside where I’ve wondered and written about rural America. Like a gawking rubbernecker passing the scene of a bad car wreck, I’ve turned my gaze in disbelief to the vacant buildings and collapsing trailers in abandoned villages and hamlets....

When did attending a conference about hungry Americans and the appalling state of our dietary health become so popular? It was easier to get a ticket this month for the upcoming Bruce Springsteen tour (seats priced over $1,000 in some venues) than it was to wangle an...

A vulture is circling overhead as I’m staring at the rubble of a house that used to be a home. Randy Cruz, the sad owner of these ruins, is giving me a tour of this ungodly collection of charred debris. “There’s my bed,” he says, pointing to the remnants of a...

Imagine sitting on the beach this summer, or lounging poolside at your favorite community center, cool sunglasses highlighting your pretty face and a cold kombucha accessorizing your newly manicured nails. Your head is nodding in a barely perceptible manner to the...

The ineffable Jim Embry, raconteur and food activist extraordinaire, motored through Santa Fe early this June as part of his Kentucky to Hawai’i “Joy and Justice Journey.” I convinced him to join me at my favorite local eatery, The Shed, for a margarita and...

I approached the planting of this year’s vegetable garden with an uncommon degree of ambivalence and lassitude. Usually, I’m fueled with an abundance of spring zeal to bring my backyard to life and shake off winter’s lethargy while demonstrating my horticultural...

For too long, I kept a bowl of potato chips, pretzels, and beer nuts on my kitchen counter. Every time I walked by, I scooped a handful of fatty, salty goodness into my mouth. On those occasions when the scoops became too many, and a wave of guilt washed over me, I...

(This is the last of five posts highlighting the history and work of USDA’s Community Food Projects Competitive Grant Program, or “CFP.” This post uses portions of previous posts that started last June as well as a more recent “Viewpoint” article at the Center for a...

Anton’s Taproom and Restaurant on Kansas City’s Main Street was where I accidentally found myself two days after Christmas. The Amtrak train that was supposed to take me from Albuquerque to Chicago was terminated at the Kansas City train station by an eastbound...

In my never-ending quest for the holy grail of righteous food, I may have finally come as close as I’m going to get. What’s included in the holy grail? Well, we used to call it the triple-bottom line—food that is sustainably produced, pays the producer fairly, and...

During my 25 years of community food organizing in Connecticut, I developed a special place in my heart for the city of Bridgeport. Squatting on the state’s coastline at the narrow end of Long Island Sound within shouting distance of New York City, how could I not...

##Commercial Announcement: Even though markwinne.com accepts no paid advertising (probably because none has been offered) we are not above scratching another’s back to soothe our own itch. To that end, the non-profit Island Press, the publisher of my latest book Food Town USA, is offering a one week only 50% off sale on all their books starting today, 10/4. Deals like this only come along once every century (or at least every two years). With only 82 shopping days left until Christmas, the time to act is now! https://islandpress.org/

Lexington, Kentucky—August 9-11 (the road trip continues) Crossing the Mississippi River is always a thrill for me—so much water, so much power, so much history! The best place, of course, to leap across the Big Muddy is Hannibal, Missouri, the boyhood home of Samuel...

Shaking off a case of pandemic cabin fever, I packed my Subaru and set out in early August to see friends and family back East. Along the way, I was looking forward to encountering good, even off-beat food stories. Yes, I intended to report on a couple of communities...

Santa Fe, New Mexico – 2001. Though the “City Different” has been a tourist mecca for decades, drawing devotees to its Southwest architecture and lively art and food scenes, there was a side to the region that visitors rarely saw. Yes, the ever-popular Santa Fe...

I’ll readily admit to being as vain as anyone else. When I first started letting the world know that I existed with my initial blog posts (2007), first book (2008), and this website, I decided to Google myself to determine how “alive” I was to the larger world. My ego...

Missoula, Montana – 1996. The anchor institution for this small western city is the University of Montana, well known, among its other academic departments, for its forestry and sustainability programs in a region that had been known for agriculture. As the century’s...

Imagine Euell Gibbons and Julia Child meeting for the first time in a California winery tasting room. In the blink of an eye, the passion between them became so intense that it threatened to curdle the cabernet. What they thought would just be a one-night stand at a...

Irish luck never made it to the Natick Community Organic Farm on March 17. The beautiful 1815 post and beam barn, whose renovation I initiated in 1976, went up in flames around 3:00 AM leaving nothing but a pile of charred, hand-hewn beams and a trail of tears across...

I recall sitting with a few volunteers on the loading dock of a small, rat-infested warehouse in Hartford, Connecticut almost 40 years ago to this day. We were stewing over what to do with a truckload of nearly rotten potatoes that constituted the first donation to...

Wayne Roberts, the Canadian food activist, writer, and unequalled lover of life passed away early the morning of January 20th. Seems only right, I guess, that one luminous northern star would fade on the same day that America’s four years of darkness would give way to...

Staring back in the mirror at my aging visage while thinking ahead to retirement’s uncertain temptations, I’m frequently tormented by the question of today’s purpose. Fifty years of food movement engagement have left in my wake many exciting achievements, some...

COVID-19 has forced more college and university courses to be conducted online. At the same time, it has curtailed travel by itinerant speakers and lecturers like myself. Since I deeply miss the opportunity to interact with students – and one or two have even...

I’m sitting at a bar in Santa Fe having a drink with a friend. The time is last February and we had just come from a fundraiser for Congresswoman Xochtl Torres Small (“Xoch”), New Mexico’s first-term Democrat for the state’s Second Congressional District. It was the...

The vines from the elementary school’s sizeable pumpkin patch were sprawling aggressively across the basketball court. In spite of the 98-degree heat, the plants were so vigorous, so verdant, that one could imagine them ascending and eventually encircling the nearby...

First off, I’m not sure if Randy Cruz’s Cruz Ranch in Sapello, New Mexico is the region’s biggest egg producer. Clawing my way through USDA’s 2017 Agriculture Statistics seems to suggest that out of the state’s 2,848 farms that reported raising poultry, the Cruz Ranch...

Kimora “Kimmie” Lynum, age 9, passed away two weeks ago from the novel coronavirus. She was the youngest person to die in Florida, where negligent public officials and lax public attitudes toward the virus have catapulted the Sunshine State into first place ahead of...

Now my dears, said old Mrs. Rabbit one morning, you may go into the fields or down the lane, but don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden: your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.                                        The Tale of Peter...

These are the times that try foodies’ souls! Lines at food banks are stretching around the block at the same time that farmers are plowing under their crops. Seed companies are running low on product as wannabee home gardeners envision rows of sweet corn where...

We are now swamped by a microscopic virus whose backlit photos suggest an organism of luminous beauty rather than one of mass destruction. In a manner not unlike the “cocooning” that we employed during the aftershock of 9/11, we are told to self-quarantine, social...

Washington, DC is where I’ll be next week, and it’s also most of the name of the paper – The Washington Post – where I was 12 years ago. Thanks to the superbly quirky and timelessly perfect Tabard Inn, I’ll be speaking about and signing my book Food Town, USA there on...

U.S. News and World Report, the online magazine whose annual rankings have sent more than one college president to an early retirement, posted a “slide show” version of Food Town, USA. With photos of the seven cities accompanied by a brief descriptive commentary for...

Good food is the new normal, taking care of our own is the new ethic, community-sanctioned entrepreneurship is the new model for growth, and the rise of the individual is the new old story. Those are the conclusions I reached after immersing myself in the food scenes...

Don’t try mailing anything to USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) after September 30th. There won’t be anybody at the Washington, DC-based agency to open the mail. In fact, there may not be a forwarding address either since NIFA, which conducts...

About a year and a half ago, my son, Peter, told me he was leaving Brooklyn to move back to Hartford, Connecticut where he was born and raised. Having lived in New York for a while and recently completed a graduate degree at N.Y.U., he had soaked up enough of the Big...

“Let’s do a food summit!” proclaimed the food policy council member, whose moving motion was immediately seconded and thirded by the council’s other members. “We can invite everybody!” suggested one member. “Michelle Obama can be our keynote!” chimed in another. “I...

          I swear to the Lord, I still can't see, why Democracy means, everybody but me.                    - Langston Hughes The walk on this sunny winter day from the Lexington and 125th Street subway station took me several blocks down Harlem’s main drag. In spite...

Last week Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts proposed a wealth tax on America’s 75,000 richest people. Not a higher income tax rate, but a tax on an individual’s fixed assets over $50 million – stuff like stocks, precious gems, and fancy baseball card...

Stand Together or Starve Alone is now available for $30 direct from the author (learn more about the book at www.markwinne.com). Act now because this offer decomposes at midnight December 31, 2018. See below for details and reasoning: We’re breaking the rules To...

                                                   Wherever this flag is flown...we take care of our own.                                                                                    - Bruce Springsteen When it comes to food and farming, there’s been an...

In the early 1950s, Mr. and Mrs. Winne moved themselves and their two young boys to the north Jersey town of Ridgewood, located just 20 miles west of New York City. Besides being within easy commuting distance of Manhattan’s corporate headquarters where Mr. Winne, the...

It hit me the other day like a ton of turnips that September marks the 50th year of my doing something.  Doing what? Well, anything that really matters, I guess. Fifty years ago, I was 18, and during those early years I wasn’t much more than a tub of self-absorbed...

Want to encourage people to eat healthier? Don’t do one thing, do many things – new supermarkets, food education, calorie labeling. Want to make a community healthier and more food secure?  The use of multiple interventions also applies.  Bring together the food...

Five farmers are standing by the side of the road selling their goods at their farmers’ market. It turned out to be one of only two main roads in Colfax, a sleepy little central Louisiana town of 1,600 people cut neatly in half by a railroad track.  Nothing too...

“No country to date has reversed its obesity problem,” was just one of the grim pronouncements I heard at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health “Obesity and the Food System Symposium.” This statement regarding the gloomy state of our fatness was offered...

Hi there, You are invited to a Zoom webinar. When: Feb 2, 2018 (Ground Hog Day) 1:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada) Topic: Can the Food Movement Stand Together?. Join Mark Winne and friends for some answers. Register in advance for this webinar:...

I’m sharing two brief excerpts below from Stand Together or Starve Alone: Unity and Chaos in the U.S. Food Movement to give you a peek into what my third book has to offer. Just a reminder, you have until March 31st to purchase Stand Together directly from the...

I am pleased to announce the release of my newest book Stand Together or Starve Alone: Unity and Chaos in the U.S. Food Movement. It is available directly from the publisher, from Amazon, and if you pout and stamp your feet long enough, at your independent book store....

My favorite farmers’ market essay is a short piece by San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll that he wrote eight months after 9/11. As America was raining “shock and awe” down on Afghanistan, and our airports were becoming maximum security facilities, Carroll’s...

I’ve always loved community gardens. I think it’s because they come in so many shapes and sizes. You can find them tucked into the oddest places like a pie-shaped city block, on the apron of an airport runway, or in the middle of a forgotten vacant lot. Due perhaps to...

Markwinne.com’s rigid subject selection criteria only allow reviews of books that include a substantial contribution by me or mention my name a minimum of five times. In this age of narcissism, the reasons should be obvious: these may very well be the only books worth...

On February 23rd, I received an email from Tim Thomas of the Arizona Food Marketing Alliance asking me to speak at the Arizona Food Summit on April 28th. I enthusiastically accepted the invitation and participated two weeks later in a lengthy planning call with other...

Sugar, rum, and tobacco are commodities which are nowhere necessaries of life…and which are therefore extremely proper subjects of taxation.  Adam Smith In his The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith displayed an uncanny sense of fairness and proportionality. He considered...

Thank You, Survey Respondents! Thank you to the 193 people who responded to my December food movement survey. Let me also thank the couple of dozen others who responded late thinking I was just joking about the deadline. The information, especially the responses to...

Dear Reader, Over the course of markwinne.com - a blog that I have been posting for nearly five years - I have been happy to share with you my views, experiences, and insights concerning both the trials and beauties of our food system. This time, however, I'm asking...

"Work and learn in evil days, in insulted days, in days of debt and depression and calamity. Fight best in the shade of the cloud of arrows.” Ralph Waldo Emerson Despair set in about 3:00 a.m. Mountain Time as the states that were supposed to fade to blue flared...

At some point in 2014 a momentous food event occurred. Unheralded by clanging church bells, it nevertheless signaled a pronounced shift in our eating behavior and a realignment of our culture’s tectonic plates. Precisely when and where no one knows for sure, but...

  Crispy days and cool nights, the heady aroma of roasting chile peppers, and the whiff of magic markers and double-sided sticky tape must mean that the fall workshop season is upon us. As you can see below I’ll be journeying to the South, the West, and my former...

“I am quite sure that people only have the kind of government that their bellies crave.” From Paterson by William Carlos Williams “Florida Lawns Are Being Transformed into Edible Farms,” gushed the Huffington Post (June 1, 2016) story about how a dozen Orlando,...

The Alaska Airlines flight dips over Cook Inlet on its approach into Anchorage. The sunlight is reflecting off of distant glaciers and the cupcake glaze of snow-topped islands. My watch tells me it’s 10:30 p.m. but the midnight sun is as bright as a summer noon in New...

My father was a business man and plastics engineer – World War II veteran, Eisenhower lover, and Fortune 500 executive. Over his morning cup of instant Nescafe and the New York Times, he’d growl at the newsprint that was inked only twenty miles east in mid-town...

In spite of what climate change deniers say, science tells us that the earth is warming. The seas will rise, extreme weather will become the norm, and our crocuses will bloom in January. For those of us with means, the immediate adjustments may only require that we...

Once again I stand in awe of the challenges and opportunities presented by our complex food system. The hard work of bringing healthy, affordable food to everyone while adequately protecting everything and everybody along the food chain is not for sissies. We may make...

Brooklyn, New York The blow to my head came out of nowhere. One moment I was turning down the bodega’s narrow grocery aisle admiring the tidy merchandise display; the next thing I know I’m dazed and seeing stars. I look down at my outstretched hands holding the...

I’m giving thanks this Thanksgiving for Thomas Piketty, the French economist and author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the much acclaimed tome on the subject of economic inequality. I acknowledge that giving over a portion of our national feast day to...

After driving for more than an hour at 70 mph down an arrow straight country road in southwestern New Mexico, I was perplexed by the fact that not only had I seen so few homes, but I was still in the same county! In those beautiful, wide-open spaces where the cattle...

What is the sound of a woman’s hands slapping a corn tortilla into shape? Is it water falling over a rocky stream bed? Or a series of slaps across your face? No, my friends, I think it’s a doctor’s slap across a baby’s bum to remind it that life has begun. Yes, I...

There’s a new kid in town, who, like the new kid before him and the kid before  her, is stirring things up. He’s saying things differently than those who preceded him, and his new ideas are making some people feel a little uncomfortable. In the parlance of the...

I think I have a crush on Gretchen Morgenson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning financial editor for the New York Times. If I had to explain my attraction, it would probably be due to her dogged pursuit of fairness, a guiding principle that she believes will be achieved by a...

For those of us who are buffeted daily by the shrill alerts that spill across our screens urging us to do this and do that, well, here’s another one: Before May 8th, go to http://www.myplatemyplanet.org/ and urge the U.S. secretaries of Health and Human Services and...

The newly elected mayor had picked up a dose of food-movement religion somewhere along the campaign trail. The exact source couldn’t be identified, but more than likely it was from those angry moms seething about the crappy food their children were eating in the...

It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to be a part of America’s race story – it has a way of finding you. This came home to me recently during my morning practice of reading poetry, the purpose of which is to warm up gently to a wobbly world. Picking up from where I’d...

Is it time for the food movement to wade once again into the messy and murky world of ethics? To stimulate a little conversation over this season of gift-giving, I've posted this link to a recent article by Andy Fisher and Bob Gottlieb. In it, they note how...

Where and when did the food movement begin? Without consulting the Book of Genesis – and to avoid a protracted debate – let’s just say it wafted in on some twentieth-century breeze making landfall on a relatively undisturbed portion of the American coastline...

During a tour of the bustling Yangpyeong street market, I learned how food figures prominently in Korea’s creation myth. According to my guide, Dae-Han Song, Bear and Tiger had an irrepressible urge to become human, so the God Spirit instructed them to go into a cave...

For a long time now I’ve wanted to share some thoughts on the relationship between our food system and the physical space where we live that has been awkwardly labeled the “built environment.”  I had the opportunity to start that reflection with a keynote speech at...

I was delighted to hear that Skagit County, Washington has decided to indulge in a community reading event that features my first book Closing the Food Gap as part of their October Food Day observances. Not only does this decision reflect the county’s good taste in...

“God knows the law of life is death.”  John Pock, poet It came suddenly the way weather does in New Mexico’s summer monsoon season. Not suddenly in the sense of unexpected – any sentient being out and about on this breathtakingly perfect Santa Fe day would notice the...

  The following is an excerpt of Mark Winne's keynote speech delivered in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the New Mexico Hunger Summit on July 17, 2014 Like most of you, I’ve come to this gathering to ask the question that no one has yet succeeded in answering: How do we...

As a newly minted medical doctor, Nimali Fernando’s baptism by fire came in a Houston community pediatric clinic where she would see as many as 60 new-born babies a day. Long hours and a bone-crushing caseload that never gave her more than 15 minutes to spend with a...

It was the second week of June in 1995, and we had just scored several flats of Connecticut early season strawberries. The excited Hartford Food System staff had arranged the delivery to the city’s three pilot farm to school sites – two elementary and one middle...

How has our approach to understanding community food systems become like our approach to poetry? I took some instruction recently from a former United States Poet Laureate, Billy Collins.                                                                             I...

Like all privileged liberals, I naturally assume I know what’s best for poor people. It begins with my Judeo-Christian ethic: what’s good for me is naturally good for them. If I can buy local, organic produce at my enthusiastically over-priced farmers’ market, so...

At least that was the fantasy headline I hoped would appear on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. But the one I feared would startle me awake one morning was, “Anti-GMO Activist Outed: Investment Portfolio Contains Monsanto Stock!” Imagine my chagrin when a...

The accounts we read of famine never fail to rip our hearts to shreds. Mass human suffering taken to a slow, excruciating end, and the cries of hungry children with no hope of being fed sink us into an agonizing torment. We wonder which is more painful: the bearing...

Leaving home at 4:00 a.m. to catch an early flight, the car’s thermometer read 8 degrees above zero. After a treacherous drive down an icy I-25 to Albuquerque, I boarded my plane and was airborne before even a hint of dawn had flickered across the Sandia Mountains. A...

Rather than offering up paeans to those fabulous Brussels sprouts I grew this year, I want to devote my harvest message to three people I’m grateful for: Bob Lewis, Kate Fitzgerald, and Hugh Joseph. To protect the innocent, let me declare from the outset that not one...

Since I speak and consult with many groups around the country, I often find myself placed on their donor solicitation lists. Many of the subsequent fundraising letters I receive are from food banks which urge me to help them feed the hungry. The letters rarely vary in...

Place: Rocky Mountain National Park – Alpine Visitors Center Elevation: 11,796 feet Date: September 2, 2013  “The National Park Service budget is down seven percent due to sequestration. We had to close the Morain Visitors Center and the Glacier campsite as well as...

Before he was a food activist and manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council, Wayne Roberts was a union leader in Ontario and a Greenpeace organizer in northern Canada. While I can’t imagine what those experiences were like, they sound rough, frigid, and unresponsive...

There’s something humbling about a 100-year old orange tree. Ancient, deeply rooted, with a gnarly trunk as thick as an old washing machine tub, its leafy crown is elegantly coiffed like that that of a manicured dowager. When standing in a large grove of these...

At the risk of being labeled a Tea Party toady or right-leaning deviationist, I have to ask if the severing of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) from the Farm Bill by the Republican House Majority isn’t an opportunity...

I’ve always wondered what it takes to turn around a really down and out place. By which I mean the type of city where the only visible signs of prosperity are a well-lit McDonalds and half-full car wash. Some will say that the only hope rests with bold, inspired...

“Faith is a stray pet that will somehow find you again.” David Hernandez, deceased poet. For the better part of 40 years, my fondest memory of retail food coops was the day they closed. Even though my heart was broken, the handwritten “Out of Bizness” sign hung from...

Ever since I abandoned my fair Connecticut for the browner pastures of New Mexico, I put more than miles between me and my former state. At times I found myself making fun of such inconsequential things as its puny size (some of New Mexico’s counties are larger than...

Imagine having nearly $2 million to spend over 3 years on the development and improvement of food policy councils in the United States. Mix in some capacity building assistance, a template for bringing together local food system stakeholders to write a food plan for...

The most recent issue of the Harvard Health Policy Review has an article by me titled "Food Democracy on the March." For those of you who have heard me speak or attended one of my food policy council trainings, some of the article's references may sound familiar. But...

The fight is underway in the Connecticut legislature to require labels on food items containing genetically engineered food. The bill has been reported out favorably by large margins in two committees.  My op-ed in favor of the bill appeared in the Sunday, 4/7/13...

I think it was the University of Wisconsin sociology professor Steve Stevenson who first coined the phrase “warriors, workers, and weavers” to characterize the three most common flavors that change agents come in. If it wasn’t him, I hope he’ll forgive the attribution...

Food Policy Advocate Mark Winne and The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future to Collaborate on Food System Policy Work #AOLMsgPart_1_5ac6725f-3498-4132-b52d-083ac3ac1a6a td{color: black;}   Mark Winne has begun working with the Johns Hopkins Center for a...

Authors' note: It's been a cold winter so far in New Mexico. A ski mountain just north of Santa Fe gave the country its coldest reading, 20 below, one day in early January. A few nights of sub-zero temperatures at lower elevations may have set back the bark beetles'...

This past year marked several growth spurts and critical shifts in the world of food policy councils. First and foremost was the incredible leap forward from 111 active North American food policy councils in 2010 to 193, as indicated by the May 2012 census conducted...

I’ll never forget the look on the desk sergeant’s face as he gazed down at me from the heights of his dark-paneled police podium. Before him was a neatly dressed, wavy-haired 18-year old cradling something seemingly as long as baseball bats wrapped in a tattered brown...

GMOs, trans-fats, and buying local. Food retail in underserved communities, farmland protection, and kicking soda out of public schools. That’s just a partial list of the cutting edge food and agriculture issues seizing the attention of lawmakers and advocates across...

I was standing in the Ambassador’s reception line nervously chatting with those closest to me. In spite of the wine that I was gulping more than sipping, and the charm of the late September Rome evening, I was growing more anxious as I waited my turn on the terrace at...

The young farmer was wearing aviator sunglasses and a black Che Guevara t-shirt. If it wasn’t for the fact that she weighed considerably south of 100 pounds, I might have felt intimidated. But any fear quickly dissipated after she told me with a shy, girlish grin to...

When the tomatoes ripen in such numbers I know it's time to can, and when the delirious scent of basil is so redolent I know it's time to pesto, I know that school is just around the corner.  Whether these seasonal signals were for me, my children, or the neighbors'...

A Review of Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice and the Limits of Capitalism by Julie Guthman  Food issue books have become as prevalent as Thai restaurants these days. One publishing house lists 32 titles devoted to the category of “Food and Culture” alone while one...

A recent article questions whether food deserts - areas with minimal access to fresh fruits and vegetables - are as pervasive as some policymakers claimed. We recap a 2009 story about an area of Brooklyn where locals grow their own vegetables due to a lack of...

USA Today's spring supplement features a great spread on guerrilla gardening by reporter Matt Villano. Mark Winne...says that after years of reporting, he concluded that guerrilla gardening is a way for people to feel like they're taking control of their lives and...

Imagine living on an island, albeit a big one, but an island nevertheless where almost everything you need has to travel across vast oceans. You can grow food and raise livestock, but most of the country is desert, and the arable land is merely a thin coastal strip....

Breaking Through Concrete by David Hanson and Edwin Marty was recently released by the University of California Press. We've been hearing great stories for some time about the urban agriculture movement across America, and you'll find many of those stories, gorgeously...

Film reviews are generally not my strong suit. I either like the characters, actors, and actresses or I don't. If the narrative doesn't engage and ultimately take me to a better place - enlightenment, excitement, ecstasy - I'll just grumble for a while and go find a...

For the two weeks before Thanksgiving I was on the road spreading the word about good food. From the San Francisco Bay to the Delmarva Peninsula, from Boston to Bethesda, and Oklahoma to Iowa, I became the itinerant preacher thumping the bible for a just and...

It's now cheaper, lighter, and more flexible, but one thing that hasn't changed about Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin' Mamas is its content. Just like the heavyweight hardcover version, it takes on the industrial food system, which, since the book's...

The rum-soaked beverage and balmy breeze were starting to erode my leftist resistance to luxury. Let’s face it, sipping a Mai Tai from a beachfront terrace with a million-dollar view of Diamond Head will dull the edge of the most hardened class warrior. But just as I...

Dan and Isabelle sit patiently on the folding metal chairs in the tastefully decorated waiting room of Seattle’s Ballard Food Bank. Intelligent, soft-spoken, and in his late 50s, Dan is a chronically underemployed architectural draftsman who barely managed to eke out...

The following link takes you to an introductory piece about food policy councils that was posted to www.nourishlife.org. Today, there are approximately 150 food policy councils across North America. And as this short Q&A style article indicates, they are proving...

“Do you want to meet Clarence?” the micro-skirted, junior assistant PR lady asked me and my son, Peter. There he sat, all 250 pounds, perched on a high captain’s chair and drawing soulfully on a cigar that was just a shade smaller than a B-flat clarinet. Clarence...

  By Mark Winne Over the years I’ve come to lean on Ralph Waldo Emerson the way a drunk leans on a lamppost.  When my frustration with politics, society, or even the weather surpasses all understanding, I go running for the shelter of my Emerson-only bookshelf, a...

Texas College Converts Football Field to Organic Farm – Is Nothing Sacred? By Mark Winne Highland Hills is one of those down-and-nearly-out communities that’s allowed a glimpse of prosperity but never gets to taste it. The Dallas skyline looms large and shining across...

This fall I had the privilege of releasing my second book Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture. As it makes the rounds of book reviews, and I tour the interview and lecture circuit – casting...

The link takes you to an online Washington Post op-ed that appeared on November 24, 2010. I wanted to share some thoughts about Thanksgiving, its meaning, and the industrial food system....

I am happy to announce the release of my second book Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cooking Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture (Beacon Press). For those readers who followed my arguments for a food system founded on justice in...

Picture this: three long-haired college kids are unloading crates of food from the bed of a battered pick-up truck. It’s parked curbside at the Androscoggin Food Co-op located in the equally battered mill town of Lewiston, Maine. The year is 1971 and these kids are,...

 I chose the lusty month of May to visit Great Britain and my first granddaughter, the 10-week old Zoe. Something of a life-long Anglophile, my daughter had married a fine young British gentleman, and together they’ve feathered a nest for themselves in a lovely little...

Testimony Submitted to the New Mexico Water Quality Control Commission by Mark Winne Starting on April 13 and continuing into May, the New Mexico Water Quality Control Commission is taking testimony on proposed changes to the state’s regulations governing the...

By Mark Winne The outstretched limbs of Savannah’s live oaks sent dappled sunlight along a wide promenade separating two rows of farm stalls in Forsyth Park. The Saturday morning farmers market was in full swing, with boxes heaped high with red peppers, collard...

Two Million Angry Moms and One Sociologist By Mark Winne Early in Free for All: Fixing School Food in America (University of California Press, 2010) former Texas Agriculture Secretary Susan Coombs declares that, “it will take 2 million angry moms to change school...

By Mark Winne        I'm worried about the coming month. Not because I have any dark premonition, but because this is the time when we slip into that autumnal haze marked by pumpkins, turkeys and cornucopias. These harvest-time icons signal the arrival of World Food...

  By Mark Winne (an edited version of this piece appeared in the Hartford Courant - July 5, 2009)   Willie Nelson was recently quoted as saying, “Dairy farmers are among the hardest workers I know.” Having hung around with a couple of dozen Connecticut dairy farmers...

  The United Methodist Women, one of the nation’s oldest and largest women-led mission organizations, has selected Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty for their 2010 national reading list. Over 40,000 members of United Methodist Women are...

When I was much younger, I would take solo backpacking trips in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. On one occasion, I found myself at a very remote campsite deep in the forest. My original plan was to commune in some vague, Thoreau-like fashion with nature,...

  (First appeared in the Kennebec (Maine) Journal)   By Mark Winne   Let me say from the outset that I eat well. Not well in a maternal, “please finish your broccoli, dear” sense. I mean very well. I cultivate a large organic garden, buy grass-fed beef from a local...