Food will be the biggest challenge of the 21st century. Will you be ready?
Mark Winne has worked for 50 years as a community food activist, writer, and trainer. From organizing breakfast programs for low-income children in Maine to developing innovative national food policies in Washington, DC, Winne has dedicated his professional life and writing to enabling people to find solutions to their own food problems as well as those that face their communities and the world.
Mark Winne's Latest Book Is Now Available
Seven Unlikely Cities that are Changing the Way we Eat
Look at any list of America’s top foodie cities and you probably won’t find Boise, Idaho or Sitka, Alaska. Yet they are the new face of the food movement. Healthy, sustainable fare is changing communities across this country, revitalizing towns that have been ravaged by disappearing industries and decades of inequity. What sparked this revolution? To find out, Mark Winne traveled to seven cities not usually considered revolutionary. He broke bread with brew masters and city council members, farmers and philanthropists, toured start-up incubators and homeless shelters.
The cities of Food Town, USA remind us that innovation is ripening all across the country, especially in the most unlikely places.
Speaking
Mark Winne maintains an active speaking schedule that includes keynote speeches for annual meetings and conferences, talks and trainings for smaller gatherings, and lectures for colleges and universities. Topics include domestic hunger and food insecurity, public health, sustainable agriculture, social and food justice, food democracy and food sovereignty, the role of public policy in promoting social change, and empowering individuals and communities to take charge of their own destinies.
WRITING
Mark’s essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the Boston Globe, Washington Post, The Nation, In These Times, Sierra Magazine, Orion Magazine, Successful Farming, Yes! Magazine, and numerous organizational and professional journals. He posts regularly to the blog on this website and is a contributor to www.civileats.org.
TRAINING
Mark Winne provides a variety of training and technical assistance services to organizations, governments, and communities interested in developing just, sustainable, and economically robust local, regional, and state/provincial food systems. These services include phone and email consultations; on-site trainings, workshops, seminars, and an array of printed and on-line resources. He also specializes in assisting groups that are developing and/or operating local, regional, tribal, and state/provincial food policy councils and networks.
Putting 50 years of community food system experience, activism, and policy advocacy to work for North America’s communities.
With the advent of industrialism and its widespread application to our food supply – factory farms, genetic engineering, and agricultural chemicals – the struggle between human freedom and authority has reached a critical juncture. In spite of the rapid growth of an alternative food system – local and sustainable food production, farmers’ markets, the public’s rising food consciousness – we become more dependent everyday on industrial agriculture whose representatives insist that it is the only way to feed a hungry world. In the face of such assertions, we must ask if our dependence on such a system threatens to supplant individual self-reliance. Will personal freedom succumb finally and forever to the dominant voice of authority? Are we at risk of sacrificing our democratic voice to self-appointed governing elites? These are no longer speculative questions suitable only for philosophers, but real-life concerns set squarely on the plate of every eater.
Mark Winne’s Blog
FINDING SOLUTIONS TO TODAY’S FOOD CHALLENGES
The Julietta Market Brings the Community Together*(##)
##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/
Blackberries, Bourbon, and Black Ownership
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...
Mark’s Big Road Trip
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...
New Mexico Goes for the Whole Enchilada*
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...
Will the Real Mark Winne Please Stand Up!
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...
Twenty-five Years of Food Security, Good Food, and Empowerment *
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...
What if Euell Gibbons and Julia Child Had a Fling
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...
A Barn Burns in Natick
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...
Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries – Katie Martin (Island Press, 2021)
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...