The Stop: How the Fight for Good Food Transformed a Community and Inspired a Movement

The Stop
How the Fight for Good Food 

Transformed a Community 

and Inspired a Movement
by Nick Saul and Andrea Curtis
Hardcover, 320 pages

 It began as a food bank. It turned into a movement.

Nobody really knows where life will take them. The best laid plans can go awry with illness, injury, divorce, death of a loved one, unemployment, or any other life-changing events. We all need a hand at one time or another and sometimes that includes food. But food banks are often the recipients of cast-off foods and seconds, unhealthy packed items and a generally dismal and often humiliating selection and process.

Nick Saul gradually turned a cramped and dreary last-refuge food bank into a movement in social and nutritional empowerment by getting the community involved. Over the years he has added gardens, kitchens, a greenhouse and farmers' markets with which people are encouraged to build skills, have fun, feel proud of their involvement and feed their families healthy foods.

Mission

The Stop strives to increase access to healthy food in a manner that maintains dignity, builds health and community and challenges inequality.

The book is intimate and encouraging, at times heart-breaking but ultimately you will be cheering for The Stop. Not only that, but I bet you will be thinking of ways that you can get involved in your local community.

Chapters Include:

1. No One Wants a Handout

2. Gardens Won't Save the Planet, But They'll Make It a Whole Lot Nicer Place to Live

3. All Good Parties End Up in the Kitchen

4. Poverty is Ruthless

5. Change Happens Because People Fight for It

6. Build a Big Tent

7. Eat the Math

8. The Power of Food

9. The Revolution Must Be Funded

10. Food Is a Public Good

http://www.thestop.org/

 

Photo credit: Karri North

NICK SAUL was executive director of The Stop Community Food Centre in Toronto from 1998 to 2012 and is a recipient of the prestigious Jane Jacobs Prize and the Queen’s Jubilee Medal. He is now president and CEO of Community Food Centres Canada, an organization that will bring the innovations of The Stop to communities across Canada. www.cfccanada.ca

ANDREA CURTIS is an award-winning writer and editor. Her family memoir, Into the Blue: Family Secrets and the Search for a Great Lakes Shipwreck, won the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. Curtis’s first children’s book is What’s for Lunch? How Schoolchildren Eat Around the World. www.andreacurtis.ca

SAUL and CURTIS live with their two boys in Toronto.