Local food and underground restaurants are ways that people are seeking to recover quality and meaning in their commercial exchanges. This book explains how this yearning can transform our unsustainable and terrifying economies, and how cultural activities like dinner parties are significant and powerful forms of social change. On 1 July The New York Times reported US Department of Agriculture data on the economic impact of the local food movement. “Getting closer to the customer” has meant $4.8 billion revenue for small-scale farming which is now, once-again, an economically viable industry with a new generation of farmers and investors. We can change the economy! One of the themes I’ve engaged over the last few years is how to get the word out about the work I do, when my academic publishers and journals don’t. This time I decided that if marketing is my job, there’s no reason to give the publishers 90% of the income from the book. So we are self-publishing. I’m into it because it’s consistent with everything I love about the new economics that is growing from the local food movement and beyond. More people want to control the creative dimensions of their work, to make things themselves, and to buy things direct from producers. As we seek products, consumption, and transactions that are more meaningful, we are learning that the economy is ours.