Here are 100 books that Economic Poisoning fans have personally recommended if you like
Economic Poisoning.
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I am the daughter of a health food fanatic whose admonitions about what to eat manifested in my early attraction to all food junky. Later in life, I became a bit of a food snob, shopping regularly at the farmers’ market for the freshest and most delicious fruits and vegetables I’ve ever tasted. My love of both good food and sharp analysis came to shape my career as an academic. Food became the object of my analyses, but always with an eye toward contradiction. I’ve written several books and articles exploring how capitalism constrains needed food system transformations, bringing me to my latest fascination with the tech sector.
While several books have been written about the horrors of industrial livestock production, none have moved me more than Blanchette’s Porkopolis.
With unforgettable stories and startling photographs, Blanchette details how workers perform all manner of intimate tasks to make industrial pigs reproduce and stay alive. I also love how he flips common-sense ideas of efficiency on their heads, showing how industrial meat production is anything but wasteful. Every bit of those pigs is used somewhere to the extent you wish they weren’t.
I have taught this book three times in my politics of food classes, and it never fails to blow my students away.
In the 1990s a small midwestern American town approved the construction of a massive pork complex, where almost 7 million hogs are birthed, raised, and killed every year. In Porkopolis Alex Blanchette explores how this rural community has been reorganized around the life and death cycles of corporate pigs. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork, Blanchette immerses readers into the workplaces that underlie modern meat, from slaughterhouses and corporate offices to artificial insemination barns and bone-rendering facilities. He outlines the deep human-hog relationships and intimacies that emerge through intensified industrialization, showing how even the most mundane human action,…
I am the daughter of a health food fanatic whose admonitions about what to eat manifested in my early attraction to all food junky. Later in life, I became a bit of a food snob, shopping regularly at the farmers’ market for the freshest and most delicious fruits and vegetables I’ve ever tasted. My love of both good food and sharp analysis came to shape my career as an academic. Food became the object of my analyses, but always with an eye toward contradiction. I’ve written several books and articles exploring how capitalism constrains needed food system transformations, bringing me to my latest fascination with the tech sector.
I am a huge fan of Freidberg’s writing. Sure, she’s an academic (so is everyone on my list), but her turns of phrase are unusually witty and—well, fresh.
I love this book because it examines our current obsession with fresh food and shows how much technology has been employed to make it so, starting with the refrigerator! But that’s not all. Freidberg provides enjoyable histories of how beef, eggs, fruit, vegetables, milk, and fish have all been engineered and marketed to give the appearance of freshness.
That rosy tomato perched on your plate in December is at the end of a great journey-not just over land and sea, but across a vast and varied cultural history. This is the territory charted in Fresh. Opening the door of an ordinary refrigerator, it tells the curious story of the quality stored inside: freshness.
We want fresh foods to keep us healthy, and to connect us to nature and community. We also want them convenient, pretty, and cheap. Fresh traces our paradoxical hunger to its roots in the rise of mass consumption, when freshness seemed both proof of and…
I am the daughter of a health food fanatic whose admonitions about what to eat manifested in my early attraction to all food junky. Later in life, I became a bit of a food snob, shopping regularly at the farmers’ market for the freshest and most delicious fruits and vegetables I’ve ever tasted. My love of both good food and sharp analysis came to shape my career as an academic. Food became the object of my analyses, but always with an eye toward contradiction. I’ve written several books and articles exploring how capitalism constrains needed food system transformations, bringing me to my latest fascination with the tech sector.
Against the backdrop of today’s obsessions with homemade, artisanal bread, Bobrow-Strain uses the most prosaic of foods—the industrially produced loaf of white fluff—to ask hard questions about race, class, gender, war, and modernity itself.
With so many food books falling into food porn mode, I can really appreciate a book that reminds me that the technologies of stripping wheat of its bran and germ were founded on ideas of racial purification. There’s plenty to chew on in this book.
The story of how white bread became white trash, this social history shows how our relationship with the love-it-or-hate-it food staple reflects our country’s changing values
In the early twentieth century, the factory-baked loaf heralded a bright new future, a world away from the hot, dusty, “dirty” bakeries run by immigrants. Fortified with vitamins, this bread was considered the original “superfood” and even marketed as patriotic—while food reformers painted white bread as a symbol of all that was wrong with America.
So how did this icon of American progress become “white trash”? In this lively history of bakers, dietary crusaders,…
I am the daughter of a health food fanatic whose admonitions about what to eat manifested in my early attraction to all food junky. Later in life, I became a bit of a food snob, shopping regularly at the farmers’ market for the freshest and most delicious fruits and vegetables I’ve ever tasted. My love of both good food and sharp analysis came to shape my career as an academic. Food became the object of my analyses, but always with an eye toward contradiction. I’ve written several books and articles exploring how capitalism constrains needed food system transformations, bringing me to my latest fascination with the tech sector.
Though out of print, I’ve returned to this book over and over again. Sure, it’s scholarly and theoretical (albeit also inclusive of some fascinating history), but no other book has helped me better understand how technology has developed around agriculture, shaping not only what farmers do but also who makes money from food and farm production.
The book is also remarkably prescient. Writing in the late 1980s, the authors were spot on in describing the new processes of food engineering that would become the dreams of today’s Silicon Valley techies. Here, I refer to those who think fabricating food out of microorganisms is the solution to the most pressing problems of the contemporary food system. I beg to differ.
This book provides an interpretation of the industrialization of agriculture, and proposes a new analytical framework for interpreting this transformation and the development of the contemporary food system. This analytical framework provides a critique of agricultural modernisation theories, while the authors introduce new concepts of "appropriationism" and "substitutionism" to propose an interpretation which overcomes the invitations of traditional approaches. The authors use this new theoretical framework to reconstruct the evolution of agricultural industrialization since the mid-19th century and to reinterpret the dynamics of social structures, the state and technology in shaping the modern food system.
I adore non-fiction books that read like novels. After ten years of working in research labs, my master’s degree in biology led me to a new career in science writing. I recently dove into the worlds of narrative non-fiction and history when I wrote Radiant, the Dancer, The Scientist and a Friendship Forged in Light. Immersing myself in Belle Époque Paris to research and intertwine the stories of Marie Curie and the inventor/dancer Loie Fuller helped me discover a passion for telling the stories of important figures forgotten by history.
While I knew that Rachel Carson was involved in starting the environmental movement with her revolutionary book Silent Spring, I had no idea that she was also a best-selling popular science author who wrote lyrical books about the ocean. It was fascinating to learn about her life and the challenges that she faced in while standing up to big chemical companies, whose profits were threatened by her writing.
Published on the fiftieth anniversary of her seminal book, Silent Spring, here is an indelible new portrait of Rachel Carson, founder of the environmental movement
She loved the ocean and wrote three books about its mysteries, including the international bestseller The Sea Around Us. But it was with her fourth book, Silent Spring, that this unassuming biologist transformed our relationship with the natural world.
Rachel Carson began work on Silent Spring in the late 1950s, when a dizzying array of synthetic pesticides had come into use. Leading this chemical onslaught was the insecticide DDT, whose inventor had won a Nobel…
I have lived in Florida since 1969, attended public school here, and received my Master’s degree from a state college. My husband, Bob Randall, a photographer and an entrepreneur, and I have written six nonfiction books about Florida. An Ocklawaha River Odyssey is our favorite. Kayaking the 56 miles of winding waterways became less of a research expedition and more of a spiritual journey as the ancient river cast its spell on us. From wildlife, including manatees and monkeys, to wild orchids and pickerelweed, the Ocklawaha provides more than exercise and recreation; it also touches your soul. I hope my writing and Bob’s photography provide that experience for our readers.
Carson’s Silent Spring is full of unsettling environmental details, including the poisoning of species of birds by insecticides and politicians' proposals to use a nuclear bomb to form a dam. Although it was published in 1962, the book is even more relevant today, and I love that it is easy to read and gives environmentalists the facts they need to counter those who would poison and destroy wildlife and, ultimately, the environment.
First published by Houghton Mifflin in 1962, Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human dangers of indiscriminate use of pesticides, spurring revolutionary changes in the laws affecting our air, land, and water. "Silent Spring became a runaway bestseller, with international reverberations . . . [It is] well crafted, fearless and succinct . . . Even if she had not inspired a generation of activists, Carson would prevail as one of the greatest nature writers in American letters" (Peter Matthiessen, for Time"s 100 Most Influential People of the Century). This fortieth anniversary edition celebrates Rachel Carson"s watershed…
For as far back as I can remember I’ve been creating fantastic stories. My high school notebooks were filled with maps of warring interstellar empires, and my graduate school notes were interspersed with short tales set in distant universes. My first science fiction novel, In Conquest Born, was published in 1985, and since then, I’ve written 14 novels for DAW Books, both in fantasy and science fiction. I love the challenge of creating alien worlds so real that my readers feel immersed in them and using them to explore the darkest recesses of the human psyche.
Poisoning is a complicated business. Your character needs to know what poisons are available, along with their toxicity, method of administration, reaction time, symptoms, and treatment.
This book offers all that information and more in language that you don’t need a chemistry degree to understand. From classic poisons to common household substances, natural venoms to street drugs, and pesticides to medical compounds, this book offers detailed information on all facets of the art of chemical assassination.
When I was studying plant science in graduate school, I realized that what I really wanted to do was not lab research but to help people understand plants better so they could grow more beautiful and bountiful gardens. To this end, I have written several books, founded the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG), taught horticulture at City College of San Francisco for several decades, and, since 2006, written a column on gardening for the SF Chronicle. My list of books about gardening know-how will painlessly prepare you to grow plants well.
This
little book, part of a series put out by the Garden, will show you the best
ways to offset climate change in your gardening and landscaping. It includes
tips on materials, energy efficiency, and increasing carbon sequestration. A
chapter by Amanda Knaul and Susan K. Pell covers the climate footprint of
homegrown food.
This technique can save the earth—while resulting in a beautiful garden, too!
Climate Conscious Gardener picks up where Brooklyn Botanic Gardening’s groundbreaking Environmental Gardener left off, giving homeowners, landscapers, and public park managers practical strategies for greening the planet through sustainable and organic gardening. In simple terms, an introductory section explains what happens when the balance of carbon and nitrogen in the atmosphere goes awry, and how plants, soil, and synthetic gardening aids (such as fertilizer and pesticides) affect climate change. Most important, readers will learn how to calculate their garden’s carbon footprint—and what they can do to decrease it…
Writing my first book, I found out how dependent my thinking about the world beyond my doorstep was on language made up by engineers (“Please don’t block the driveway”). Engineering language defined how I saw the street. It was a shock to realize how severely this had limited my thinking about public space but also a liberation to become aware of this: now I could perceive streets in completely new and different ways. The books I recommend all have made me perceive the world differently. I hope they do the same for you. Also, see the recommendations by my co-author, Marco te Brömmelstroet.
Until this book, I didn’t realize we live in a culture that applauds starting, growing, and flowering while turning a blind eye to ending, decaying, and dying.
Harald Welzer starts out by calculating how humans turn more living matter on Earth into dead matter each year. We don’t seem able to see that this is a sure way to stop living. Having survived a stroke, he asks the question: "What life do I want to have lived?" This is the framework of the book.
Along the way, he shares wonderful examples of (artistic) endeavors that attend to the ending–of a factory’s life, of insects killed by pesticides, of cathedrals that can only be built by accepting that some of them will crumble before they are finished.
Our culture has no concept of stopping. We continue to build motorways and airports for a future in which cars and planes may no longer exist. We're converting our planet from a natural one to an artificial one in which the quantity of man-made objects - houses, asphalt, cars, plastic, computers and so on - now exceeds the totality of living matter. And while biomass continues to decline due to deforestation and species extinction, the mass of man-made objects is growing faster than ever. We're on a treadmill to disaster.
To get off this treadmill, argues Harald Welzer, we need…
I am a writer, an anthropologist, and a mother. I spent five years researching ancient human survival skills and learning from modern wilderness survival experts about how to live the original Homo sapiens lifestyle. I became deeply invested in the importance of these skills amidst climate change and digital transformation because they connect us to our evolutionary heritage and safeguard our species’ survival into the future if and when our civilization collapses (as all past civilizations have done!) I find hope in being prepared for the possible demise of our industrial system, embracing the opportunities that arise instead of trying to preserve it at all costs.
Foraging is my favorite survival skill. Discovering food in the wild provides the perfect dopamine rush, and it’s exactly what we evolved to do as humans.
Nicole’s comprehensive guide covers so many edible plants and also gives fun, inventive recipes, so that even if it’s not the apocalypse, you might want to experiment with things like pickled magnolia leaves or elderberry pancakes.
When I find wild plants I intend to eat, I always like to double check with another field guide or the online citizen science database iNaturalist to make sure I did the ID correctly – nobody wants to end up like Into the Wild’s Christopher McCandless in that bus in the Alaska wilderness!
319 color pages, 400 wild foods, plant localization maps for each plant (400 maps), paperback, great print quality, superior plant identification guidelines, recipes for each plant, full page photos of the plants, at least 3 pictures for each plant, medicinal uses.
The Forager’s Guide to Wild Foods is probably the most important thing you want to have by your side when you go out foraging. Maybe there are times when you're still not sure about a certain plant and you need to consult the book, despite your vast experience. Or maybe you don’t have experience at all and just want…
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