THE ERA OF AGRI-ACTIVISM HAS ARRIVED!

Forget about low carb diets. 2006 was the year of the low carbon diet.

“Local and sustainable” is the new “farm fresh,” according to the NY Times, which cited “food miles” as one of the year’s catchiest catch phrases. The agricultural culture war that’s been fermenting on the foodie frontier finally exploded this year, bombarding us with books about our fuelish food system.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma put Michael Pollan at the top of the literary food chain; Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics and What to Eat, was omnipresent, bursting Big Food’s bubble on every media outlet from NPR to CNN to last Wednesday’s NY Times:

Call it “gateway activism,” a term I learned from The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, a funny and fascinating new book by food activist Sandor Ellix Katz. Subtitled “Inside America’s Underground Food Movements,” Katz’s book charts the intersection of food and politics from every angle, giving a comprehensive, thoroughly annotated overview of how agribusiness and perverse government policies have hijacked our food culture and corrupted the American diet.

Katz finds a silver lining to this toxic corporate cloud in the Small is Beautiful boosters: the seed savers, dumpster divers, feral foragers and agrarian activists all over the country who’ve rejected Monsanto’s monolithic monoculture in favor of a more seasonal, sustainable food chain.

In his quest to document every avenue of food activism, Katz takes a walk on the wild side with the Wildroots Collective, a group that puts the car back in carnivore by recycling roadkill. They eat insects, too; Katz shares Wildroots’ recipes for grasshoppers and crickets, which are best roasted over a pan and taste something like popcorn. “They’re surprisingly tasty and filling…crickets are incredibly high in calcium and potassium.”

Wildroots recommends sautéing slugs and sun drying earthworms, which can then be “ground into a very nutritious flour, which can be used as a soup thickener.” But if the idea of eating bugs doesn’t appeal to you, you can at least chew on the strange historical tidbits Katz dishes up, including these two:

The infamous Abu Ghraib prison where U.S. soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners was “previously home to Iraq’s national seed bank and research facilities.” Katz cites a report from the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organization which documents how our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan resulted in the destruction of “generations of seeds of all crops” and the loss of “much seed expertise.” No doubt Monsanto will be happy to sell the Iraqi farmers their patented, genetically modified seeds.

In the U.S., government agencies are contemplating a ban on non-native invasive plant species, which may be a sneaky way to undermine the “grassroots free trade of seeds and plants” that lets home gardeners and small family farmers cultivate rare and heirloom varieties. Katz finds a forerunner to this current bout of botanical zenophobia in Hitler’s Central Office of Vegetative Mapping, which in 1942 declared a “war of extermination” against a particularly invasive variety of impatiens, citing the threat this “Mongolian invader” posed to “the beauty of our home forest.”

This is one of those rare books that anyone, no matter how much or how little you know about our corroding food chain, will find enlightening and entertaining. Will it inspire me to scoop up freshly flattened squirrels on my backcountry bike rides? Probably not, but I will definitely give the chickweed pesto recipe a try.

Then again, maybe eating roadkill is not as radical as it sounds. Our friend Joel, a skilled hunter, has carved up the carcasses of deer that collided with his car, and brought home the venison. When life gives you meat, make meatballs. Beats leaving Bambi for the buzzards.

The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved is a smorgasborg of activist anecdotes, horticultural history, and literally wild recipes. All the ingredients for a great read. Go Inside America’s Underground Food Movements and get to the bottom of what’s eating America.