2025 winner in “Specialty Title” category, New England Society Book Award
2024 winner in “Socially Conscious” category, The Readable Feast
Interview with Cathy Stanton and Emma Ellsworth (Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust) on The Fabulous 413, Aug 7, 2024 (interview starts at 32:17)
Food Tank’s “20 Food Systems Reads that Will Inspire You This Summer”
Civil Eats’ “Summer 2024 Food and Farming Book Guide”
“Hero in aisle five: Wendell author’s new book, ‘Food Margins,’ delves into the anthropology of groceries,” Tinky Weisblat, Greenfield Recorder, June 4, 2024
Podcast interview on New Books Network, hosted by Brian Hamilton, May 23, 2024
Q&A with Olivia Weeks: Can a small-town food co-op survive? Daily Yonder, April 12, 2024
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“Cathy Stanton presents a piercing, passionate, and profoundly braided account of the community’s effort to save a small food co-op.”—Julian Agyeman, coeditor of Cultivating Food Justice: Race, Class, and Sustainability
“Stanton’s writing is accessible and enjoyable, not academic. She is engaged, committed, and even hopeful without being naive or cynical. She mixes scholarly inquiries with personal experience, resulting in vivid and unexpected insights into the American food system.”—Brian Donahue, author of Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farms and Forests in a New England Town
“As Stanton narrates the co-op’s history, she addresses key topics in food studies, ranging from food policy and the role of capitalism to the history of grocery stores and supermarkets in the US and how racism is embedded in the food system. This lively, accessible book offers multiple lessons about the contemporary food industry and how communities work to change it.”—CHOICE
“Food Margins leaves the reader gripped with the question of whether [the food co-op] will survive and with a deep appreciation of what it takes to bring fresh food to the shelf.”—Amy Wu, Civil Eats
“Stanton explores the challenges that small businesses face in the shadow of giant corporations and the deep racial and class inequities that compound such struggles. The story of the co-op and Stanton’s efforts is rooted in the understanding that this tale is just one of many in a time when food systems are growing increasingly inequitable and unsustainable.” —Food Tank
“A profound meditation on the American food system… a must-read for anyone thinking about the contradictions of our current food system and its impending crises. Food Margins is a unique and bold undertaking. It is unique in how it uses the author’s lived experience as an anthropologist and historian; it is bold because it strips bare the modern food system by tracing its genealogical violence from the plantation to the factory to the market. This book represents a significant resource for any who wishes to understand the food systems’ dynamics of contradiction and capitalism systems at the margins.” – Gastronomica (February 2025)
