Healthy Soul Food with a Side of Activism

As the former founding Executive Director of Island Grown Initiative, a non-profit that supports the small family farms and farmers of the island, food writer and activist Ali Berlow is committed to raising awareness and raising consciousness about the food that we feed to our families. Berlow and her husband, Sam Berlow, launched Edible Vineyard in 2009. A quarterly print magazine, EV is dedicated to the local community on Martha’s Vineyard, featuring stories and recipes from the Island. If you’ve had enough of E. coli scares, disappearing farmland, pesticide problems, and hunger in your community, Ali Berlow’s latest, The Food Activist Handbook: Big & Small Things You Can Do to Help Provide Fresh, Healthy Food for Your Community (Storey Publishing), will show you exactly how one person really can make a difference.

Alice Randall is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Wind Done Gone, Pushkin and the Queen of Spades, Rebel Yell, and Ada’s Rules, and the only person to ever study with Julia Child for credit at Harvard. An acknowledged authority on African-American cookbooks, Randall teaches the course “Soul Food, in Text, as Text” at Vanderbilt University.  Her latest book is Soul Food Love: Healthy Recipes Inspired by One Hundred Years of Cooking in a Black Family (Clarkson Potter). In May 2012, Alice Randall penned an op-ed in the New York Times titled “Black Women and Fat,” chronicling her quest to be “the last fat black woman” in her family. She turned to her daughter, Caroline Randall Williams, for help. Together they overhauled the way they cook and eat, translating recipes and traditions handed down by generations of black women into easy, affordable, and healthful dishes. Soul Food Love relates the authors’ fascinating family history (which mirrors that of much of black America in the twentieth century), explores the often fraught relationship African-American women have had with food, and forges a new way forward that honors their cultural and culinary heritage.