Biographical note:

NICK SAUL was executive director of The Stop Community Food Centre in Toronto from 1998 to 2012 and is a recipient of the prestigious Jane Jacobs Prize and the Queen’s Jubilee Medal. He is now president and CEO of Community Food Centres Canada, an organization that will bring the innovations of The Stop to communities across the country. www.cfccanada.ca
 
ANDREA CURTIS is an award-winning writer and editor. Her family memoir, Into the Blue: Family Secrets and the Search for a Great Lakes Shipwreck, won the the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. Curtis's first children’s book is What’s for Lunch? How Schoolchildren Eat Around the World. www.andreacurtis.ca

Country of final manufacture:

US

Excerpt from book:

My hands are covered in toner from our finicky photocopying machine when the garden assistant opens the door, the sounds of the busy street racing inside with her. Everyone in the open space looks up. She’s tanned after a summer in the sun and seems excited.
              “You have to come into the back,” she says. “We’re making callaloo.”
              I’ve never heard the word, but I’m glad of a reprieve from the maddening machine. We head out the door, around the side of the apartment building and into the food bank. Rhonda is inside the community space. With more staff, we’re now able to use it regularly, including for the new community kitchen groups that Rhonda has started.
              A cluster of people is sitting at one of the round tables. And I can see through the small pass-through into the cramped kitchen that there are more inside. The smell wafting out is thick with garlic. We all sit down, and Herman, our garden neighbour, emerges wearing an apron, carrying a tray covered in leafy greens that he’s steamed and cooked with salt fish, garlic, onions, salt and pepper, and sweet red peppers. “Callaloo,” he says proudly.
              Rhonda tells us the story as we take our tentative first bites. One day recently Herman came into the garden and saw some volunteers pulling out what they thought was a weed. “That’s no weed,” he told Rhonda. “It’s callaloo.” So she asked Herman to show everyone how the Caribbean specialty is cooked and eaten, and today a group of volunteers is trying out his favourite vegetable.
              The verdict is good. It looks and tastes a lot like spinach or kale. Herman is pleased, proud to show off his Jamaican roots.
              Rhonda did a bit of digging and discovered that Jamaicans aren’t the only ones who love this plant. People all over the world know it and its different varieties as “amaranth” and eagerly eat the tender leaves, stalks and seeds. She also found that farmers north of the city call one variety of the plant “pigweed” and consider it a scourge. The seeds spread easily in the wind and they struggle to contain it on their farms.
              I look at the faces around the table—Herman and Rhonda; Francesca and Dorino; Gordon, who’s been working at the plot since the first day we dug the fence posts; a woman who lives in a rooming house nearby and suffers from severe diabetes.
              One person’s weed, it seems, is another’s de“The Stop is an inspiring true story about how a low-income neighborhood used good food to take charge of its community—it’s a great lesson for all of us.”
—Jamie Oliver

"The Stop is one of those forward-thinking groups pointing the way to the future of good food.” 
—MARK BITTMAN

“The riveting inside story of a food bank that through perseverance and principle turned itself into one of our most visionary movements for justice and equality.”
—NAOMI KLEIN, author of The Shock Doctrine and No Logo
 
“In clear and honest prose, [Saul and Curtis] share their struggles and hope with plain talk through tough decisions. How better to learn about ending hunger than through the story of a former food bank whose aim was to put itself out of business?”
—RAJ PATEL, author of Stuffed and Starved

“This is an important book. The Stop is no ordinary account of the substantial benefits of soup kitchens to servers and served. It is an impassioned account of how to create food systems that foster independence and eliminate the indignities of charity. Saul and Curtis put a human face on poverty. If you want to know what today’s food movement is really about—and why it is anything but elitist—read this book.”  
—MARION NESTLE, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University and author of What to Eat

“The Stop reads like a compelling novel…but it’s all real. This book enables readers to join the frontier of true democracy, where we hear the voices, smell the aromas, and feel the stories of people creating communities of mutuality. Food becomes the ‘uniter’ of cultures and generations—where each of us feels respect and has voice. Read it and see possibilities for yourself and our world that maybe you’ve never seen before.”
—Frances Moore Lappé, author of EcoMind and Diet for a Small Planet