Conversations in Food Studies by Colin R. Anderson, Jennifer Brady, and Charles Z. Levkoe (Eds.)

This inspiring collection of essays by mostly young and freshly minted scholars takes me back 50 years, to my own misspent youth during the 1960s and ’70s, when I was part of a social history gang eager to “rewrite history from the bottom up.” We wanted to ask new questions and use new methods, sources, and insights to study groups that had been unjustly ignored and marginalized, and to make what we learned available and accessible to everyday people. Although I left the university milieu to work for various social movements, and though I often wince at the grandiose and harsh accusations we made as well as the utter lack of experience and street smarts we imposed on our cause, I am proud of what that generation of labour and women’s studies pioneers accomplished.