Food Margins

Lessons from an Unlikely Grocer

Cathy Stanton

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN:
  9781685751203
• Print ISBN:
  9781625348050
  9781625348067
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

Winner of the 2025 New England Society Book Award for Specialty Titles
Winner of the 2024 Readable Feast Award for Social Consciousness 
Named one of Food Tank's 20 Food Systems Reads that Will Inspire You this Summer

In a food industry shaped by the abundance, cheapness, and convenience that giant corporations can offer, small-­scale ventures struggle to survive, as anthropologist Cathy Stanton discovered when she joined the effort to save a small food co-­op in a former mill town in western Massachusetts. On the margins of the dominant system, Stanton found herself reckoning with its deep racial and class inequities, and learning that making real change requires a fierce commitment to community and a willingness to change herself as well.

Part memoir and part history lesson, Food Margins traces the tangled economic and political histories of the plantation, the factory, and the supermarket through the life of one New England town. Stanton tells a complex and compelling story of a rural community imagining and creating a viable alternative to the mainstream in a time of increasingly urgent need to build a more socially and ecologically just food system.

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Magic
• Chapter 1: Settling
• Chapter 2: Handholds
• Chapter 3: Target Market
• Chapter 4: Deconstructed Burger
• Chapter 5: (Some) People Before Profits
• Chapter 6: After the Plantation
• Chapter 7: Hintered Lands
• Chapter 8: The C-Word
• Chapter 9: Margins
• Chapter 10: Signs
• Chapter 11: Futures
• Notes
• Index
• Back Cover