Coming Spring 2026

Feeding the World as if People Mattered

How Small Farms Produce Value Beyond Yields

The dominant view of agriculture has focused only on what we produce. It sees value in terms of capital gains or yield efficiency, masking how our global food system produces tremendous amounts of food commodities while failing to feed people, support rural communities, or enhance ecological wellbeing. Feeding the World as if People Mattered asks us to look more deeply and more humanely at what we perceive to be most valuable in our agricultural systems.

This book draws on fifteen years of anthropological research, taking readers to fields in South India, Eastern Europe, and North America where people are already feeding the future amid global change. From these fields, I show how a radical rethinking of the value of small farms and farmers is already happening. Bringing together conversations in agriculture, economics, anthropology, and the environmental humanities, I explore how small farms reproduce social and ecological relationships and argue that is the only sustainable path forward.

For anyone who is curious about the food on their plate and the people who helped to get it there, Feeding the World as if People Mattered will offer a new way to find value in the food we grow and the people who grow it.

“With its engaged ethnography, sensitive portrayals, and sharp critique, Flachs’s book can be considered the twenty-first century's transnational sequel to Walter Goldschmidt’s work that celebrated America’s small farms. Highlighting the limitations of industrial, capitalist agriculture, this book flags the potential that small farms in various parts of the world hold for ushering in new agrarian and social orders. If to ‘grow is to grow together’ in the spirit of community solidarity and cooperation, then this book enables us to question the tropes of productivity and unlimited growth.”—A.R. Vasavi, author of Shadow Space: Suicides and the Predicament of Rural India
 
“Around the world, the most common livelihood that people have is small-scale farming, even though it is becoming increasingly marginalized by the corporations and states that shape people's lives. This wonderful new book, based on extensive work with small-scale farmers around the world, demonstrates that how the costs and benefits of small-scale farming are counted is a gross misrepresentation of its value. Small-scale farmers produce a greater diversity of life by building strong, meaningful relationships between people, plants, and landscapes. Rather than being the face of the past, this book shows that small-scale farming is critical to the face of a sustainable future. It will be essential reading for everyone who recognizes the peril facing our planet.”—A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi, author of Hungry for Change: Farmers, Food Justice and the Agrarian Question

“This book is an exciting exploration of contemporary agriculture’s entangled webs of life, labor, and power. Flachs unveils how gardens and farms—whether in the Midwest, Bosnia, or Telangana—are not mere sites of production but vibrant places of creativity and resistance, where new configurations of human and nonhuman work point to a world beyond capitalism. This book is crucial for everyone seeking to understand how capitalism’s agrarian orders are remade and contested through everyday acts of resistance and reciprocity, offering a hopeful reimagining of agrarian life—and human possibility—in these turbulent times.”—Jason W. Moore, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital

“What might a degrowth approach to global agriculture look like? Flachs argues that farming must be unmoored from the logics of productivism that have led to stark inequalities in the global food system. Reimagining farming as reproduction, the book makes a forceful argument for a return to agriculture’s roots as a social relation, rather than an economic one.”—Sarah Besky, author of Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea

“Andrew Flachs is a genius! This is the book we have needed for a long time to help us rethink our approach to food, agriculture, and human values on a societal level. Its insights are as significant for understandings of food and farming as The Omnivore’s Delima, and it is just as accessibly written. This book was a joy to read and gives me hope yet that we might come to think differently about food, the people and other beings who produce it, and what we really value!”—Terese Gagnon, editor of Embodying Biodiversity: Sensory Conservation as Refuge and Sovereignty

“This book offers an urgent reappraisal of agriculture as life-making rather than profit-taking. It shows with elegance and insight how farming can anchor communities, sustain ecologies, and nourish hope. This is a work that will change how you see the land—and what it means to grow food in a troubled world.”—Sophie Chao, author of Land of Famished Beings: West Papuan Theories of Hunger

"And here is a timely book! Written in verdant, relatable language, Feeding the World as if People Mattered, brings together gardens from India to Bosnia to the United States to remind us that growing food is always about nurturing community, fostering robust (and, yes, feral) ecologies, as well as feeding a vision of a human place on Earth. Flachs’ book gives fresh reasons to doubt the single-minded arguments about global food security. It will resonate with scholars as well as with homesteaders, gardeners, and food growers involved in underground food movements worldwide."—Larisa Jasarevic, author of Beekeeping in the End Times

“Feeding the World as if People Mattered is a stark reminder that rather than ensuring that the world is sustainably fed, the current industrial food system is dividing and destroying it. With sharp analysis and engaging illustrations drawn from extensive fieldwork around the world, Flachs shows that another agricultural model based on small-scale farms is not only possible, but that it deepens social networks and enhances ecological diversity in ways that deliver benefits that go far beyond yields and profits."—Jennifer Clapp, author of Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why it Matters