[New Book] Everyday Experts: How Peoples Knowledge Can Transform the Food System

New Book Available Free for Download

http://www.peoplesknowledge.org/new-book-everyday-experts/

We face a series of national and global food-related crises. In the UK and in many parts of the world there are record levels of obesity, while there are also rising numbers experiencing malnutrition, including some of those who are obese. A UK government minister says our soils may only last another thirty years because of their mismanagement.

A new book from CAWR, Everyday Experts, available for free to download, explains how knowledge built up through first-hand experience can help solve these and other crises in our food system – at home and abroad. It brings together fifty-seven activists, farmers, practitioners, researchers and community organisers from around the world to take a critical look at attempts to improve the dialogue between people whose knowledge has been marginalised in the past and others who are recognised as professional experts.

Using a combination of stories, poems, photos and videos, the contributors demonstrate how people’s knowledge can transform the food system towards greater social and environmental justice. Many of the chapters also explore the challenges of using action and participatory approaches to research.

The chapters share new insights, analysis and stories that can expand our imagination of a future that encompasses:

• making dialogue among people with different ways of understanding the world central to all decision-making
• the re-affirmation of Indigenous, local, traditional and other knowledge systems
• a blurring of the divide between professional expertise and expertise that is derived from experience
• transformed relationships amongst ourselves and with the Earth to confront inequality and the environmental crisis