The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities

Eric Schlosser, investigative journalist and author of the 2012 nonfiction work Fast Food Nation, welcomes readers in his Foreword to Will Allen’s The Good Food Revolution with a discussion of race relations in America and its impact on food production, both historically and currently. He credits Allen’s firsthand knowledge of the situation, acknowledging that “[h]is family lived it” (xi). Schlosser points out that although the Great Migration to the North improved the lives of many black families in the South, “they frequently traded one set of problems for another” (xii). Schlosser describes some of these problems in detail: health problems, poverty, and shortened life expectancy. He blames the cigarette and fast food industry for the “health disparity between blacks and whites” (xiii) and commends Allen and his efforts with Growing Power as a transformative force: Allen is “a pioneer of urban agriculture and a leader in today’s food movement” (xiii), a man who “has spent years working among the poor, preaching a message of compassion and self-reliance” (xiv). 

Allen introduces his mother, Willie Mae Kenner, in the first chapter, as she leaves Batesburg, South Carolina for Washington, D.C., “trying to escape [their] family’s long history in agriculture” (1).