Florencia Ramirez

Author & activist Florencia Ramirez will be at The Book Catapult on Thursday, March 8th at 7:00pm to discuss and sign her book, Eat Less Water. 

Experts predict two-thirds of people living on this planet in 2025 will experience water scarcity, a situation expected to result in the deaths of millions and an unprecedented rise in military conflicts. Can we as individuals hope to have any effect on the global scale of water misuse? Yes, we can make a significant difference - with our food choices - learned author and activist Florencia Ramirez as she traveled across the nation to interview farmers and food producers. Tracing Ramirez’s tour of American water sustainable farms - from rice paddies in Cajun Louisiana to a Hawaiian coffee farm to a Boston chocolate factory and beyond - Eat Less Water tells the story of water served on our plates: an eye-opening account of the under-appreciated environmental threat of water scarcity, a useful cookbook with water-sustainable recipes accompanying each chapter, and a fascinating personal narrative that will teach the reader how they, too, can eat less water.

Florencia Ramirez is a trained researcher at the University of Chicago's School of Public Policy. She won the sixth Gift of Freedom Creative Nonfiction Award from the A Room of Her Own Foundation (AROHO). Her articles appear in Edible Communities Magazine, the San Jose Mercury News, among others, and her popular blog. She lives in Oxnard, California, an agricultural town on the Pacific coast that smells of celery, strawberries and fertilizers with her husband and three young children.

Note from Seth: this is a fascinating book about the shocking amount of water that goes into the food we eat. 7 out of every 10 gallons of water used in the US is for food production! That's crazy! Florencia visited farmers and growers all over the country, learning how they manage water in their production of foods - so rather than a shaming everyone for bad things are, she focuses on the folks who are doing it right, in the hopes that we can all learn from them and be smarter about the choices we make in the grocery store.