An Excerpt from Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System
An excerpt from Reaping What She Sows by Nancy Matsumoto, published by Melville House and longlisted for the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards in the Current Events & Public Affairs category
When the Covid-19 pandemic ripped through global food supply chains, it threatened the livelihoods of farmers, created shortages in supermarkets, and revealed a startling truth to consumers: the food system is broken, and large corporations did the breaking. An idea began to take hold–what if we could return to a time when our needs were met by the farmers in our own communities, rather than a commodity, Big Food system that favors profit above all else?
With in-depth, on-the-ground reporting, Nancy Matsumoto introduces readers to the women changemakers who are building local and regional supply chains, from the maverick farmers, millers, and bakers bringing back local grain economies; the brewers, distillers, and winemakers who are regenerating land and ecosystems; indigenous and diasporic seed savers, and many more changemakers.
Reaping What She Sows offers a blueprint for what eating enjoyably, sustainably, and ethically looks like today. Essential for those who are concerned about climate change, their own health, and the lack of choice and transparency in the global food supply chain.
Reaping What She Sows has been longlisted in the Current Events & Public Affairs category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below is the book's Introduction.
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ON AN EARLY SEPTEMBER AFTERNOON, I stand with Noreen Thomas on the edge of the pancake-flat, twelve-hundred-acre Moorhead, Minnesota, farm that has been in the Thomas family for close to one hundred fifty years. Since being certified organic in 1997, it has produced high-quality organic grains, garden produce, and pasture-raised eggs. Thomas points to the bird habitat buffer she is encouraging with a late-August hay cutting, which will provide ample protection for ground-nesting meadowlarks.
The bright-yellow-bellied birds’ numbers had for years been in steep decline due to loss of habitat and mortality caused by intensive single-crop farming of corn, soy, or sugar beets, and the chemical fertilizers and pesticides that mode of farming relies on. Today, the birds’ resurgent presence on Doubting Thomas Farm is a sign of ecosystem health. Not only do they add beautiful color and song to the landscape, they are also the first defense against pests such as caterpillars and grasshoppers, keeping their numbers in check. In another part of the farm, Thomas shows me a trial field of perennial sunflowers, part of a set of practices that are making the surrounding land and waters healthier and more climate resilient, and filling a gap in the market after the Russia–Ukraine war made sunflower oil harder to come by.
Doubting Thomas is an outlier in Clay County and in Minnesota, where only one percent of farms are certified organic. It is a tiny island of biodiversity in a vast golden sea of genetically modified, chemically treated monocrops that ripple out as far as the eye can see. Going against the tide has not been easy, but Thomas says, “It’s about providing really good food for my family, my grandchildren, and the community. If people didn’t discern a difference in flavor, I wouldn’t bother. But they do, and it’s something we’ve forgotten, how food should taste.”
Thomas is just one of the dozens of audacious women I met on my travels across North and Central America, from the Indigenous fishing grounds off Vancouver Island, British Columbia, to the lush tropical cacao forests of Belize, and the gently sloping mountains of Vermont, who are creating an alternative or “alt food system” that is shorter, more direct, transparent, and equitable than the broken food system run by the global monopolies of Big Food.
By “food system,” I mean the processes and infrastructure involved in feeding a population, from sowing seeds, to growing and harvesting, to processing, packaging, distribution, and disposal. It may seem counterintuitive to talk of a broken food system. The shelves of our big box stores are stocked to the rafters with products, and we’ve come to take for granted their accessibility and low prices. What could be wrong with that? We are so comfortably ensconced in the world that industrial Big Food has constructed around us that we are unable to see that all this cheap and convenient food is eroding our health, our environment, the health and wellbeing of our laborers, and our choices.
It takes imagination to see that there is another way to live, another way to harvest our land and our seas, to feed the world equitably and with dignity, and to protect our planet. According to a report from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the hidden cost of our global food system in 2020 amounted to $12.7 trillion,1 or about 10 percent of global GDP. Seventy-three percent of those hidden costs are related to unhealthy dietary patterns that our industrialized food system promotes. Developed countries, with their diets high in processed foods, refined carbohydrates, and saturated fats, and low in whole fruits, vegetables, and grains, bear the brunt of these costs, in the form of chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. Costs to the environment—over half of which are due to food production–related nitrogen emissions and are a primary driver of biodiversity loss2—account for another 20 percent. And as ample evidence has shown, those costs are disproportionately borne by the poorest among us, who cannot afford to cocoon themselves in the protective swaddling of countries or neighborhoods where the air is cleaner, the waters less toxic, the grocery aisles filled with chemical-free food. Unless we change the way we produce food, continued destruction of ecosystems and habitats will threaten our ability to sustain human populations.
I have spent much of my career chronicling different aspects of “the good food movement” toward healthier and more sustainable growing practices. It is a subject matter that chose me. As someone who loves to eat and drink, and write about eating and drinking, reporting on the creations of top chefs and the sourcing of rare ingredients felt pleasurable yet incomplete. My love for these things was too closely tied to the impulse that drove me to write a junior high school report on global hunger: the belief that access to delicious and nourishing food is a basic human right.
My views have been shaped by my culture, too. As the third-generation daughter of Japanese immigrants, I felt the unspoken love that is best communicated through cooking and eating together around the dining room table; the delight taken in fresh, seasonal ingredients; the respect paid to nature, and those who farm, fish, forage, and hunt for our food; the concept of mottainai, of never wasting food that can feed a hungry mouth. Wasting food, as my father liked to say, “is a crime against nature.”
Being the daughter of World War II US concentration camp survivors made me appreciate the forms of cooperative and mutual aid that my ancestors practiced when the government of their adoptive country was not on their side. So it was natural to want to tell similar stories in this book, of the importance of First Nations people and members of the African, Vietnamese, Palestinian, and Indian diasporas in creating and maintaining forms of mutual aid, and their work building more just and resilient food systems that helped them thrive on the margins of the dominant food system.
They are cultivating a modern hybrid form of land and water stewardship, combining the ancient wisdom of traditional food gathering and production with more than a half century of trial, error, and research into organic and regenerative (meaning replacing as much energy as you take from nature) methods. For these women who have dedicated their lives to forging a more democratic, healthy, and climate resilient way of food production, the question has been: What will it take to hasten the dismantling of our broken food system?
In addition to the devastating loss of life the COVID-19 pandemic caused, it also revealed the cracks and flaws in our globalized industrial food system. Widespread shortages of basic foods and supplies were a shocking wake-up call to the fact that the highly processed foods and factory-farmed animals we’ve come to take for granted rely on very long, global supply chains that are fragile and increasingly vulnerable. The war between Ukraine and Russia created a supply chain disruption in grains and fertilizer. We witnessed the mass slaughter of animals and the dumping of milk due to interruptions to the global supply chain. Increasingly frequent episodes of climate instability, too, have underscored how vulnerable we are when any kind of global crisis disrupts the normal flow of goods around the globe. Food, we realized, was a form of national security, and we ignore local food production and resilience at our peril.
The good news is that people turned to shorter supply chains closer to home: the farmers, fishers, and ranchers we overlooked because going to the supermarket to buy inexpensive fruit from Peru or beef from Brazil was more convenient. We discovered that producers closer to home offer food that is fresher, more nutritious, and often more equitable, and that we can support local economies at the same time. We discovered, as paleontologist, ecologist, and food systems expert Catherine Badgley says, “that resilience is at the local scale, and not through enormous supply chains.”
The industrialized Big Food system relies on those enormous chains, as well as economies of scale, large government agricultural subsidies, well-compensated lobbyists, and extractive farming practices, which determine what and how we eat. “Extractive,” in the context of agriculture is the opposite of “regenerative,” meaning taking out more biomass and fertility than is put back into the land. Usually it involves the use of chemical fertilizers to make up for the loss of native soil fertility, the clearing of big trees, and tilling the soil with machines. It is valuing the gains from this extraction, but not making up for the losses.3
The growing interest in regenerative agricultural practices reflects a desire to reverse centuries of exploitative practices and restore balance to our ecosystem, and this interest was on full display during the tumult of the pandemic.
As I write this, Donald Trump has just begun his second term as president of the United States. The next four years will likely see the unraveling of gains made during the previous administration to fix our broken food system and make the lessons of this book—on the importance of mutual aid, cooperative assistance, and ancestral knowledge—all the more relevant. As I write this, in Canada, where I am living, society has been thrown into chaos by the 25 percent tariffs Trump has imposed on Canadian goods. With $70 billion USD in agricultural trade between two countries hanging in the balance, farmers on both sides of the border will suffer. Like the pandemic, this crisis will underscore the need for more local and regional food systems. You can make it a priority to fight for such systems over the corporate consolidation and lobbying power of Big Food. You can make it a priority to fight for the health, safety, and fair wages of migrant farm workers; for federal and state antidiscrimination policies; for practices that support soil conservation, clean water policies, and climate resilience.
As for my subjects, you may wonder, why the focus on women? Women have historically been important leaders of food production and distribution. But in the post-matriarchal societies of the modern age, male farmers gained better access to land ownership, credit, and agricultural education. In North America—with the exception of wartime shortages in male labor—that shift has occurred as the small family farm has given way to male-dominated mega-farms.
Yet it is because women have been relegated to the margins of food production that they are the early adopters of progressive food system change. Bu Nygrens, director of purchasing at the women-owned produce distribution company Veritable Vegetable, cites UN studies that have demonstrated “when women control the finances of a community they share the wealth. People do not go hungry, children are fed, and everyone gets a fair shake. It’s about cooperation not about competition.”
Finally, although I focus on alt food system producers and not on their much more numerous industrial-scale counterparts, this book is not about bashing large-scale, long-supply-chain producers, and lionizing the artisanal, the direct trade, and the small batch just for their own sake. I am arguing for systemwide change, bringing the two sides together so that one day they will become more similar than different. That is happening, and I have met the people who are on the ground and on the water building local food networks and pushing for grassroots change. Now it’s time for you to meet them, too.
Nancy Matsumoto
Toronto, 2025
Excerpted from Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System by Nancy Matsumoto, published by Melville House. Copyright © 2025 by Nancy Matsumoto. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Nancy Matsumoto is a Toronto- and New York City-based writer and editor who covers food, agriculture, and the environment. With Michael Tremblay, she is the author of the book Exploring the World of Japanese Craft Sake: Rice, Water, Earth, which won a James Beard Media Award. Her articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Saveur, Food & Wine, and Civil Eats.
