Buy new:
-14% $21.35$21.35
FREE delivery Friday, September 13
Ships from: htcklkn Sold by: htcklkn
Save with Used - Very Good
$7.66$7.66
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Nineboneg
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Image Unavailable
Color:
-
-
-
- To view this video download Flash Player
Follow the author
OK
The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements Paperback – Illustrated, November 1, 2006
Purchase options and add-ons
From James Beard Award winner and New York Times–bestselling author of The Art of Fermentation
An instant classic for a new generation of monkey-wrenching food activists.
Food in America is cheap and abundant, yet the vast majority of it is diminished in terms of flavor and nutrition, anonymous and mysterious after being shipped thousands of miles and passing through inscrutable supply chains, and controlled by multinational corporations. In our system of globalized food commodities, convenience replaces quality and a connection to the source of our food. Most of us know almost nothing about how our food is grown or produced, where it comes from, and what health value it really has. It is food as pure corporate commodity. We all deserve much better than that.
In The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, author Sandor Ellix Katz (Sandor Katz's Fermentation Journeys, The Art of Fermentation, and Wild Fermentation) profiles grassroots activists who are taking on Big Food, creating meaningful alternatives, and challenging the way many Americans think about food. From community-supported local farmers, community gardeners, and seed saving activists, to underground distribution networks of contraband foods and food resources rescued from the waste stream, this book shows how ordinary people can resist the dominant system, revive community-based food production, and take direct responsibility for their own health and nutrition.
- Print length400 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherChelsea Green Publishing
- Publication dateNovember 1, 2006
- Dimensions6 x 1 x 9 inches
- ISBN-101933392118
- ISBN-13978-1933392110
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Frequently bought together

Similar items that ship from close to you
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"A perfect introduction for the eager eater aiming to blend a dose of conscientiousness into his or her daily soup and bread, this book is thorough, instructional, and encouraging. It's a friendly manifesto of one man's commitment to keeping his mind where his mouth is. In his informal narrative Katz manages to convey a vast amount of complex information in an accessible way. By sharing his personal journey (including his own share of contradictions and hypocrisies) Katz allows readers to identify with him as a food lover trying his best to grapple with the responsibility of conscientious eating, while delighting in its pleasures."--Slow Food Snail
Library Journal-
This is the story of the consumer revolution against globally industrialized agriculture and corporate domination of food production, processing, and distribution systems. Katz (Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods) asserts that there are alternatives to the dead, unhealthy, homogenized food commodities this system provides. He visited farmers' markets, food cooperatives, and communities in search of local initiatives that restore traditional food production and distribution methods and revive local economies. Katz found a broad movement of people and organizations involved in preserving native varieties, practicing humane and sustainable treatment of land and animals, supporting local producers and marketers, and using food to improve health. Of particular note is the rapidly growing 'slow food' movement, which rejects standardized fare and focuses instead on cuisine that has served ethnic and cultural preferences in the past. Each chapter cites references for further reading and organizations involved in keeping the programs active. This work is sure to enlighten readers and motivate many to join the revolution. Recommended.
"If you wish to reclaim a connection to the food you eat, consider Sandor Katz' (author of Wild Fermentation) newest book. The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved champions various causes against our modern food supply. From seed-saving as a political act to the role of food in healing, it's an invaluable handbook. A passionate crusader, Katz is also funny, quirky and eminently likable. Each chapter contains one of his low-tech recipes and ends with multiple resources pages including supportive books, films and organizations."--Mail Tribune
-- Rebecca Wood"Sandor Ellix Katz's book The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved introduces us to people who moving the field closer to the table. The people we meet in this book are reclaiming their right to not only eat healthy, wholesome food but are asserting their right to grow and produce what they eat for themselves and offer for sale. If your friends and family refer to you as a "foodie" then when you read Katz's book you will meet people who are journeying along a similar path. From road kill gourmets to bread club members, the people you encounter while reading Katz's book have rejected the mass industrial food complex that dominates North American food choices. Katz introduces us to people who know there are choices and who are willing to act upon that knowledge. Taking charge of your food supply, even in a small way, is a liberating and healthy act."--Permaculture Kitchen
"This work is sure to enlighten readers and motivate many to join the revolution. Recommended."--Library Journal
"What's for dinner? Zesty politics, delicious democracy, and satisfying grassroots action. Devour this book."--Jim Hightower, radio commentator and author
"The politics and ethics of food production and consumption touch all of our lives, and there are too few books on the subject. The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved is packed with good information and ideas. I already buy my milk fresh from the farm next door, but after reading this, I'm ready to be a card-carrying member of the raw milk underground. Read it before you go shopping again!"--Eric Robbins, Apple Valley Books, Winthrop, Maine
"Don't miss this remarkable manifesto."--Sally Fallon, president of the Weston A. Price Foundation and author of Nourishing Traditions
"Sandor Katz has given us a refreshing, wholesome, wise book on something that affects all our lives. It points us not only to eating in a new way, but thinking in a new way. I hope it will be widely read."--Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States
"The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved is a deeply nutritious book."--Deborah Madison, author of Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America's Farmers' Markets
"Most importantly, in teaching us about these movements, Katz inspires us to take it a step further, whatever our food persuasions may be. You may end up setting up an underground food market, where people can sell bread that they bake in their own ovens and milk that isn't tampered with by government regulations. You'll gather dandelion leaves, chickweed, mushrooms, prickly pear or whatever else grows in your own backyard. You'll school yourself in herbal healing, live in raw food decadence, get involved in a grassroots land-rights movement or finally take more than five minutes to savor a meal with friends."--Sopaipilla, Earth First!
From the Publisher
"Sandor Katz provides an in-depth look at the new food revolution and aptly describes a political climate in which "eating well has become an act of civil disobedience." From bread clubs to the raw milk underground, consumers are voting against commercial food with their taste buds and their pocket books. Don't miss this remarkable manifesto." --Sally Fallon, president of the Weston A. Price Foundation and author of Nourishing Traditions
"Sandor Katz has given us a refreshing, wholesome, wise book on something that affects all our lives. It points us not only to eating in a new way, but thinking in a new way. I hope it will be widely read." --Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States
"Most importantly, in teaching us about these movements, Katz inspires us to take it a step further, whatever our food persuasions may be. You may end up setting up an underground food market, where people can sell bread that they bake in their own ovens and milk that isn't tampered with by government regulations. You'll gather dandelion leaves, chickweed, mushrooms, prickly pear or whatever else grows in your own backyard. You'll school yourself in herbal healing, live in raw food decadence, get involved in a grassroots land-rights movement or finally take more than five minutes to savor a meal with friends." - Sopaipilla, Earth First! Samhain/Yule 2006
About the Author
Sandor Ellix Katz is a fermentation revivalist. A self-taught experimentalist who lives in rural Tennessee, his explorations in fermentation developed out of his overlapping interests in cooking, nutrition, and gardening. He is the author of four previous books: Wild Fermentation, The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, The Art of Fermentation―which won a James Beard Foundation Award in 2013―and Fermentation as Metaphor. The hundreds of fermentation workshops he has taught around the world have helped catalyze a broad revival of the fermentation arts. The New York Times calls Sandor “one of the unlikely rock stars of the American food scene.” For more information, check out his website: www.wildfermentation.com.
Product details
- Publisher : Chelsea Green Publishing; Illustrated edition (November 1, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 400 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1933392118
- ISBN-13 : 978-1933392110
- Item Weight : 1.3 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,069,651 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #491 in Coffee & Tea (Books)
- #714 in Political Freedom (Books)
- #1,241 in Food Science (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Sandor Ellix Katz is a fermentation revivalist. His books Wild Fermentation (2003) and the Art of Fermentation (2012), along with hundreds of fermentation workshops he has taught around the world, have helped to catalyze a broad revival of the fermentation arts. A self-taught experimentalist who lives in rural Tennessee, the New York Times calls him “one of the unlikely rock stars of the American food scene.” The Art of Fermentation received a James Beard award, and in 2014, Sandor was honored with the Craig Claiborne Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southern Foodways Alliance. For more information, check out his website www.wildfermentation.com.
Customer reviews
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star5 star83%14%0%3%0%83%
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star4 star83%14%0%3%0%14%
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star3 star83%14%0%3%0%0%
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star2 star83%14%0%3%0%3%
- 5 star4 star3 star2 star1 star1 star83%14%0%3%0%0%
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the content interesting and informative on the food revolution. They also appreciate the humble, clear, and flowing writing style.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the content interesting, illuminates difficult subjects, and thoroughly researched. They also describe the book as revolutionary, providing a comprehensive overview of current food options, politics, and the food activism movement. Readers also mention that the author has great passion for not only the problem, but the solutions.
"...Scholarly without being stuffy, he ponders the social, political, ethical and environmental consequences of the foods we choose to eat, of the foods..." Read more
"...His books are excellent reading, he is extremely knowledgeable and shares his knowledge joyfully with everyone" Read more
"...He is both candid and circumspect, and I am impressed with the depth of his knowledge regarding the world's foodways and their history...." Read more
"...Besides being incredibly informative, it is also beautifully written and very inspiring. In fact, I found it impossible to put down...." Read more
Customers find the writing style humble, clear, and flows well. They also mention that the author incorporates plenty.
"...Whether filled with desire or with disgust, the author writes with humility and clarity. And charity...." Read more
"...His writing style is humble, clear and flows well -- while he incorporates plenty of information about his and his own experiences, the first..." Read more
"...Besides being incredibly informative, it is also beautifully written and very inspiring. In fact, I found it impossible to put down...." Read more
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Sandor Ellix Katz, author also of Wild Fermentations, examines our food choices, challenging us as would a moral philosopher, and inspiring us as might a romantic poet. But unlike poetry and philosophy, his texts are thoroughly researched and extensively footnoted. Scholarly without being stuffy, he ponders the social, political, ethical and environmental consequences of the foods we choose to eat, of the foods we choose not to eat, and of even our very acts of choosing. Food for thought about food.
Each chapter offers a wholesome essay that can be read independently of the others. Though inexpensive for a book of nearly 400 pages, its binding is especially durable. If separated physically from the whole, the leaves of each chapter stay bound together. This reviewer speaks from experience, having extracted entire chapters in this manner to distribute among friends.
Such portability is an appealing feature precisely because the topics are so diverse that few readers could possibly find the entire book relevant to their lives. Chapters such as these: Seed saving as political statement. Seeking and drinking raw cow's milk as acts of civil disobedience. The corporate takeover of natural foods, and the USDA makeover of organic foods. Whole food as healer, and processed food as killer. Medicinal herbs, including marijuana, as not just alternatives to pharmaceuticals, but their very basis. Pure and free water as birthright, now imperiled by pollution and privatization. Gardening as a means of reclaiming Eden. Vegetarianism as an act of compassion in contrast to carnivorous cruelty.
Vegetarians will be especially sensitive to and maybe even appreciative of the author's discussion of vegetarianism. Katz, a lapsed vegetarian, weighs the significance of life as a vegetarian among omnivores. The reasons for his own vegetarian apostasy are especially edifying. The chapter "Vegetarian Ethics and Humane Meat" begins almost with a confession: "I love meat. The smell of it cooking can fill me with desire.... At the same time, everything I see, hear, or read about standard commercial factory farming and slaughtering fills me with disgust." Whether filled with desire or with disgust, the author writes with humility and clarity. And charity. He continues: "I hold great respect for the ideals that people seek to put into practice through vegetarianism."
Katz acknowledges that vegetarians will brand "humane meat" a contradiction of adjective with noun, yet he nobly and duly presents the gist of vegetarian ethics and effectively distills into a few pages what we'd expect from an entire book.
This emerging moral vocabulary is one whose etymologies can be attributed to vegetarian evangelists and animal liberationists. Their shouts of protest and their cries of lamentation have been heard. Many meat eaters grown uneasy with their own complicity now seek the lesser of several evils. Michael Pollan, the eloquent author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, too deserves credit for expanding this lexicon.
Pollan, however, is less forthright about his own omnivorism than is Katz. Instead, Pollan applies his considerable intelligence merely to rationalize and bolster his considerable decadence. For Pollan, meat's taste trumps its waste. Rather than renounce meat as a superfluity, he chooses to denounce its cruelty. So thanks to Pollan and to his readers whom he has rallied to the cause, many herds of open-pasture cows and many flocks of free-range hens are now being spared the horrors of the feedlot and the factory farm. But that is small comfort to the cows and the hens still prodded on their death march to the slaughterhouse.
Pollan hunted a feral pig to write about it. Katz slaughtered a farm-raised pig to eat it. For Katz, writing is an afterthought to eating, as when he describes in necessary detail the physical difficulties of slaughtering a pig or a chicken. And Katz's book, in contrast to Pollan's, is one of few about food in which narrative use of the first person is welcomed and warranted. This is because Katz's life experiences and his resulting perspectives both are so very unique.
For instance, Katz expresses disillusionment with the pharmaceutical industry, yet he admits to his dependence upon their pills and potions for treatment of his AIDS. He even chronicles the long struggle of his unsuccessful attempt to survive and function without those pills and potions. Such candor about being poz is rare, and a testament to the author's integrity. Let's hope that Katz copes well with AIDS, and that he lives a long and healthy life, long enough to complete his third book, and fourth and fifth and sixth.
- Mark Mathew Braunstein
Katz's approach is truly one of conservation and relativity -- he constantly notes that each individual's particular body chemistry, culture and food preferences mean that a diet that works for him (now) may not work for you. He encourages exploration, examination and critical thought.
Sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the negative reviews of his books on Amazon are largely from homophobes. While he mentions he's fighting AIDS with diet and medication, and that he lives in a queer community - he's not hamfisted about his sexual orientation or lifestyle. He's clear and up front about it but in no sense does he ever offer judgement about the relative merits of his orientation to the mainstream (nor is the book in anyway about sex). Katz provides details about his life as they are relevant to his experiences and experiments with food -- but he's clearly not out to recruit people to the "Gay Nation" nor to challenge their assumptions on homosexuality.
It's very clear that his mission is to provide a catalyst for his readers (whom he assumes are intelligent, inquisitive folks) to scrutinize their diets and food sources and to arm them with tools for making the best choices based on their own particular situations.
But this book is even more about the regulatory state of affairs, corporate dominance and government abuse than about what we consumers are doing. I just wanted to learn about where I can get good, healthy food, and found myself feeling helpless against government coups and land grabs and the enormous loss of farm land to urbanization.
I began to lose interest in the book three-quarters of the way through as I came across recipes for cannabis butter and sassafras root beer, vegetarian ethics and roadkill worth scavenging. How do I wrest control of food production from government and corporate dominance by learning about water rights, eating of insects and recycling of vegetable oils for fuel?
Katz appears to be someone who has traveled a long and rich road on his life's journey, a clear benefit to his wonderful writing which avoids dogmatism and absolutism. He is both candid and circumspect, and I am impressed with the depth of his knowledge regarding the world's foodways and their history.
This book provides a comprehensive overview of our current food options, politics, and the government's excessive control. It loses some focus as the author tries to cover every conceivable topic related to food. I recommend it to anyone interested in the history of food politics.










