Listen to the radio interview featured on Cover to Cover with Danny Smithson on KPFA.
Listen to INSIGHT's Jeffrey Callison radio interview.
"Writer William Emery and photographer Scott Squire plunged into the heartland, including San Joaquin County, because home-made food tastes blissfully better. But also because they believe "edibilism" - Emery's "ism" for catching or making one's own food - is morally superior to America's factory food industry."
The fellowship of food. That's what we call this interconnected world of people who feed and tend their communities with their crops and traditions. This collection looks deep into the heart of the peach, and the people who grow it. It taps into a longing and a passion for authentic taste and for knowledge of the lives of people who devote themselves to these fresh, baked, canned, and preserved endeavors.
Edges of Bounty finds its characters in the outposts, on the margins, at the crossroads. Through the eyes of William and Scott, these people emerge as folk heroes, kitchen visionaries. These are individuals still tapped into land and place, rooted in their philosophies, their practices, their maniac desire to feed their families and the planet something healthy, gorgeous, and delicious. You read it in their words, you see it in their faces and the way they live and stand their ground. The land comes to life. The Central Valley of California is rendered again. Writer and photographer watching, asking, searching.
—from the foreword by NPR’s Kitchen Sisters
"In a valley where nothing has been left untouched; everything
channeled and leveled, removed and replaced, conquered and
resigned, a handful of renegade farmers and lovers of real food
have held onto the idea that a farm is more than a factory, a
potato more than a utensil to convey ketchup and salt to your mouth.
Eccentric, passionate, and bold, this book tells their story, takes
us to the edge, shows us the slow and the patient, introduces us to those who have been quietly working to return food to where it
belongs; at the center of our families and communities."
—Michael Ableman, Farmer and author of On Good Land and Fields Of Plenty
“Edges of Bounty vividly documents the survival and revival of small-scale grassroots food production in the midst of America’s monocultural wasteland. It is a celebration of local food and the quirky people who farm it, fish it, hunt it, and transform it. This book weaves their stories and wisdom together into a passionate manifesto for “edibilism.” Read this book and get inspired to join the edibilist revolution!”
—Sandor Ellix Katz, author of The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements and Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods
“Fiercely passionate in their views and compassionate to their subjects, Emery and Squire take us on a voyage of discovery amongst those who uphold an ancient and now subversive way of life. Edges of Bounty provides hope for the future and respect for the past— powerful medicine that tastes delicious, too.”
—Alisa Smith, co-author of Plenty: Local Eating on the 100-Mile Diet
“Now, finally, is your chance to take that trip you've always longed for... through the backroads of the countryside in search of those people, places, and foods that transcend the ordinary, and become mythic. You couldn't ask for better guides. William Emery and Scott Squire really do take you there, through words and pictures, to meet face to face the farmers, ranchers, fishers, bee-keepers, hunters, cooks, butchers and others who live in intimate communion with their place on earth. Reading Edges of Bounty, we suddenly remember what it means to be truly human, and the deep nourishment we are offered each and every day by the land, the water, the plants, the animals and (perhaps most importantly) by each other.”
—Jessica Prentice, chef and author of Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection
"Writer Emery and photographer Squire have ferreted out the eccentrics, ordinary folks, individualists, and anarchists who are the unsung stewards of backroad crops and critters and backwater catches that are hidden away between XX in the north and Bakersfield in the south. Their gift to us is a vision of a far more variegated and human landscape than the ruling culture, uniform and grim, of Central Valley industrial agriculture."
—Stanley Crawford, author of A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small Farm in New Mexico
“This book explores the life and work of a vanguard of “guerrilla farmers”: the resistance movement that's keeping our old cultures and wisdom surrounding food and farming alive. These farmers thrive or struggle at the edge of the voracious "blob" of industrial agribusiness in the CA Central Valley, one of the world's most industrialized agricultural zones. They are the keepers of knowledge that is slowly regaining currency and value, as the cost of the unsustainable ways of most "modern" agriculture become obvious and untenable. Emery and Squire take us on a joyful ride through the way things used to be, still are in some places, and are now thankfully coming back to our communities.”
—Guillermo Payet, founder of LocalHarvest.org