As CEO, she built Skipper Otto’s short supply chain piece by piece. She added Indigenous and women fishers to her roster, which now includes about 40 fishing families. Their catches are sent to a local processing plant before they are shipped directly to customers in Canada.

Journalist and author Nancy Matsumoto calls women like Strobel the “the builders of the alt food system.” In her new book, Reaping What She Sows: How Women Are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System, to be published Oct. 28, Matsumoto tells the stories of women who are changing how we grow, source, and eat food today.

Working outside the industrial food system, these women are creating short supply chains that consider factors other than profit. Strobel, for example, works with fishers to set catch prices that will not just cover their costs but also support their families. She sets the Community Supported Fishery (CSF) minimum upfront share price at $100 (about U.S.$71 ) in the first year, which can be used to buy fish throughout the year. Prices fluctuate, but members may get sockeye salmon fillets for as little as $28 (U.S.$20) per pound, or Arctic char caught by Inuit fishers for $33 (U.S.$23.50) to $44 (U.S.$31) per pound.

The seafood that her 1,000 CSF members receive typically includes salmon, halibut, tuna, and spot prawns, though it changes depending on whatever “the ecosystem is providing in abundance any given year,” as Strobel explains in the book.

Throughout her book, Matsumoto, who is also a longtime Civil Eats contributor, compares these smaller alternative models to the industrial food system. Each chapter focuses on a specific food group, such as grains, produce, and meat and poultry.

She begins with Black mutual aid societies, which she argues set the stage for the modern alt food movement, and ends with multi-ethnic seed savers protecting the survival of diverse and culturally significant plants. In between, she reflects on the history of her own family, who, as Japanese Americans, were forced to live in internment camps during World War II.

Civil Eats spoke to Matsumoto about her book, the alt food system, and why women have been pivotal in the system’s development.

Why was it important to tell these stories?

A lot of people are attracted to terms like f”arm to table,” “sustainable,” or “regenerative,” but they don’t have a deep understanding of what it means to grow in this way and the barriers to market or profitability. The idea was to pull the lens back and show a bird’s eye view of the alt food system.

How does the system you describe differ from a system controlled by agricultural corporations?

It has short, direct, and transparent supply chains, while the Big Ag or Big Food supply chain is long, opaque, extractive, and inequitable. It lacks the economic advantages of the corporate commodity food system because it doesn’t have economies of scale.

These women are doing work they’re not getting paid for, which is all of the ecosystem services work. They’re regenerating soil that has been depleted over centuries of conventional agriculture. They’re trying to clean up waterways with better practices and bring back wildlife diversity and pollinator habitats. The global commodity food system was able to profit on all of these things, because they externalized so many of those costs onto the environment and human health. That’s part of the vast inequality between the two systems.

But these women are also bringing economic vitality. There is so much academic literature showing that when you have local and regional farm economies, the fabric of life in a community is so much more resilient, robust, and healthy.