A James Beard Award winner celebrates the women heroes who are fighting Big Food to create a healthier, more just system—and answering the question: How should we eat?

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: our globalized, industrial food system is broken. Today’s tariff wars only underscore the need for change, and a bold idea that is taking hold: what if we return to a time when our needs were met by producers in our own communities, to a food system that prioritizes the health of our families, our communities, a planet over profit-at-all-costs ethos? Yet not just a nostalgic return to the past, but a grafting of the best modern agricultural and environmental practices onto community-based food systems.

Exploring the World of Japanese Craft Sake: Rice Water Earth is part sake primer and part travelogue, an absorbing journey through 2,500 years of sake history that is designed for readers ranging from sake novice to industry expert. The authors tell the story of this ancient beverage through the voices of the master brewers, generational brewery owners, rice farmers, yeast researchers, koji mold merchants, bartenders and cooks who live and breathe sake. The book is illuminated throughout by their intense dedication to craft and their love of Japan’s national beverage.

By the Shore of Lake Michigan, Tomiko and Ryokuyō Matsumoto’s collection of Japanese tanka poetry, is now accessible to English-language readers for the first time. The volume offers a rare look into the inner lives of an often-overlooked generation during the most difficult period of their lives.

In 1960, my grandparents, Issei (first-generation) immigrants, published their collection, ミシガン湖畔 (Mishigan Kohan/By the Shore of Lake Michigan). Their tanka—a traditional form of Japanese poetry—chronicled their lives over a seventeen-year period, from their 1942 forced relocation from Los Angeles to the Heart Mountain, Wyoming prison camp, through their resettlement in Chicago at war’s end.

My collaboration with author Joanne Oppenheim, whose collection of extraordinary oral histories, diaries, and letters tells the story of the Heart Mountain, Wyoming U.S. government prison camp. Included are voices of from former inmates, students, teachers, those who volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army, and resisters who refused to serve unless their rights as citizens were restored and their families released. Included are the stories of both my mother and father’s families. Illustrated with photos from family collections, archives, and newspapers.

This book was prompted in part by the 2016 election of Donald Trump, and the disturbing echoes of past injustices that began to reverberate after he took office. . The Trump administration’s assault on immigrant rights brought back painful reminders of the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World war II despite a complete lack of evidence of wrongdoing. Publisher Tom Adler and editor/designer Evan Backes assembled a powerful set of photographs of the Manzanar, California prison camp. I contributed an introductory essay and section introductions and a writer I admire, Pico Iyer, wrote the foreword.

This collection of essays and photographs examines a new generation of craftspeople, artisans who are seeking a more meaningful and sustainable life by reconnecting with their heritage and bygone traditions. It’s a theme that aligns perfectly with what’s happening in the world of Japanese craft sake. My contribution is a chapter on three brewers, all of whom have innovated by returning to traditional methods: One embraced the idea of creating a high quality, yet affordable sake; another returned to sourcing locally grown rice, and a third turned back the clock to a pre-industrialized form of traditional sake making.

This photo-art novel was the result of a collaboration with artist and University of New Mexico emeritus professor Patrick Nagatani. The Race marked Patrick's evolution from visual to prose storyteller, and a continuation of his interest in environmental, spiritual, feminist, and pacifist issues. It tells the story of fifteen women pilots engaged in a trans-Pacific race from Tokyo to San Francisco. Patrick created stunning photographs incorporating plane models he constructed for each character.. I was one of nine writers who contributed chapters to the novel.

This book, which I wrote in collaboration with Dr. Marcia Herrin, the founder and head of the Dartmouth College eating disorders program, grew out of a cover story that I reported for People magazine. People of all ages who struggle with this insidious mental disease are too often unjustly stigmatized for a condition that is as genetically and biologically based as diabetes or schizophrenia. They can, however, take hope in advances in the field that herald more effective treatments.