Nancy Matsumoto is the author of Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System, which will be released in October but is available for pre-order now. The book is a collection of stories about women that are creating alternative food networks. They are building out local and regional supply chains in the face of overwhelming odds and the destructiveness of industrial agriculture.
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While the book traces how broken our global food system is, it’s quite hopeful. All of the women featured are doing something about it. They are making changes. They are building something. We talk a lot about supply chains, how long they are and the work that it takes to shorten them. We talk about how an obscure Eurasian grass called kernza is having a positive impact on landscapes in the north central US while being used to create beer. How cacao producers in Belize and Guatemala are getting organized to better their situation. If you want to be inspired in making the changes you want to see in the world, read this book.
We also talk with Nancy about the art of writing. We actually have the same agent and have faced a lot of the same challenges in the media industry, which has become nearly impossible to navigate. Putting non-fiction narrative books like this together require tremendous amounts of time and patience, yet we do it because these are important stories to tell. Nancy has also written the books Exploring the World of Japanese Craft Sake and By the Shore of Lake Michigan, a translation of WWII-era Japanese concentration camp poetry.
Again, the latest book is Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System. Order a copy or follow Nancy on her just launched Substack, Reaping, by Nancy Matsumoto, which follows some of the stories from the book.
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