Here are 100 books that Foodopoly fans have personally recommended if you like
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In the late 1980s, I led a team of researchers who studied relations between Vietnamese refugees, Hispanic immigrants, and native-born residents of Garden City, Kansas, many of whom came to work in what was then the world’s largest beef packing plant. I became fascinated by the meat and poultry industry. Since then, I have studied industry impacts on communities, plant workers, farmers and ranchers in Nebraska, Oklahoma, and my hometown in Kentucky. The meat and poultry industry is highly concentrated, heavily industrialized, and heavily reliant on immigrant labor. As such, it has much to teach us about where our food comes from and how it is made.
This is a must-read book about Spam. No, not the kind that clogs up your inbox, but the cheap canned meat that pioneered the postwar love affair with processed foods, which Monty Python so cleverly satirized.
In this hard-driving and wide-ranging investigation, Ted Genoways focuses on Hormel Foods and its signature product—Spam—to expose the dark underbelly of industrial pork production that brings us our bacon, hams, chops—and Spam. It broke my heart and turned my stomach at the same time.
A powerful and important work of investigative journalism that explores the runaway growth of the American meatpacking industry and its dangerous consequences.
On the production line in American packinghouses, there is one cardinal rule: the chain never slows. Every year, the chain conveyors that set the pace of slaughter have continually accelerated to keep up with America’s growing appetite for processed meat. Acclaimed journalist Ted Genoways uses the story of Hormel Foods and soaring recession-era demand for its most famous product, Spam, to probe the state of the meatpacking industry, including the expansion of agribusiness and the effects of immigrant…
In the late 1980s, I led a team of researchers who studied relations between Vietnamese refugees, Hispanic immigrants, and native-born residents of Garden City, Kansas, many of whom came to work in what was then the world’s largest beef packing plant. I became fascinated by the meat and poultry industry. Since then, I have studied industry impacts on communities, plant workers, farmers and ranchers in Nebraska, Oklahoma, and my hometown in Kentucky. The meat and poultry industry is highly concentrated, heavily industrialized, and heavily reliant on immigrant labor. As such, it has much to teach us about where our food comes from and how it is made.
I am an enthusiastic meat eater. So are most Americans. I know how cows, pigs, and chickens are turned into meat and poultry. Most Americans don’t. Putting Meat on the American Table offers a concise and witty overview of America’s love affair with both meat and convenience.
And how the two have been married to transform both animals and meat from the barn to the meat counter. I especially liked the chapter on the hot dog, a “meat cocktail” that encapsulates our fixation on meat, convenience—and fun.
Engagingly written and richly illustrated, Putting Meat on the American Table explains how America became a meat-eating nation-from the colonial period to the present. It examines the relationships between consumer preference and meat processing-looking closely at the production of beef, pork, chicken, and hot dogs. Roger Horowitz argues that a series of new technologies have transformed American meat. He draws on detailed consumption surveys that shed new light on America's eating preferences-especially differences associated with income, rural versus urban areas, and race and ethnicity. Putting Meat on the American Table will captivate general readers and interest all students of the…
In the late 1980s, I led a team of researchers who studied relations between Vietnamese refugees, Hispanic immigrants, and native-born residents of Garden City, Kansas, many of whom came to work in what was then the world’s largest beef packing plant. I became fascinated by the meat and poultry industry. Since then, I have studied industry impacts on communities, plant workers, farmers and ranchers in Nebraska, Oklahoma, and my hometown in Kentucky. The meat and poultry industry is highly concentrated, heavily industrialized, and heavily reliant on immigrant labor. As such, it has much to teach us about where our food comes from and how it is made.
Giant corporations control every sector of our economy. Nowhere is this more evident than in what we eat and drink. Controlling these corporations are families about which we know very little. This book pulls back the curtain to reveal the families that created these food empires.
I knew how Cargill captured the grain market, and Walmart muscled its way to the top of the grocers’ mountain. But I had no idea that an obscure German holding company came to dominate what I thought were independent coffee and bakery chains or how the company whose name is on the out-of-season berries in the produce aisle doesn’t really grow them at all. If you are a foodie, Barons will open your eyes and probably turn your stomach. It sure did mine.
Barons is the story of seven corporate titans, their rise to power, and the consequences for everyone else. Take Mike McCloskey, Chairman of Fair Oaks Farms. In a few short decades, he went from managing a modest dairy herd to running the Disneyland of agriculture, where school children ride trams through mechanized warehouses filled with tens of thousands of cows that never see the light of day. What was the key to his success? Hard work and exceptional business savvy? Maybe. But more than anything else, Mike benefitted from deregulation of the American food industry, a phenomenon that has consolidated…
In the late 1980s, I led a team of researchers who studied relations between Vietnamese refugees, Hispanic immigrants, and native-born residents of Garden City, Kansas, many of whom came to work in what was then the world’s largest beef packing plant. I became fascinated by the meat and poultry industry. Since then, I have studied industry impacts on communities, plant workers, farmers and ranchers in Nebraska, Oklahoma, and my hometown in Kentucky. The meat and poultry industry is highly concentrated, heavily industrialized, and heavily reliant on immigrant labor. As such, it has much to teach us about where our food comes from and how it is made.
I like this book because it adapts Eric Schlosser’s best-selling Fast Food Nation for young adult readers. It is a superb and readable overview of the fast-food industry, from its history to its deceptive advertising, to its mistreatment of workers in its factory farms, slaughterhouses, and restaurants, to the harm it does to the environment, animals, and our health.
But it doesn’t just decry the industry’s many problems. It also describes restaurant chains that are offering healthy alternatives and what young and old alike can do to improve our food choices and influence government policies that have benefited the rise of fast food and its exploitation of workers and eaters alike.
Based on Eric Schlosser's bestselling Fast Food Nation, this is the shocking truth about the fast food industry - how it all began, its success, what fast food actually is, what goes on in the slaughterhouses, meatpacking factories and flavour labs, global advertising, merchandising in UK schools, mass production and the exploitation of young workers in the thousands of fast-food outlets throughout the world. It also takes a look at the effects on the environment and the highly topical issue of obesity. Meticulously researched, lively and informative, with first-hand accounts and quotes from children and young people, Eric Schlosser presents…
I’m a political economist interested in development which I’ve been studying, researching, and writing about since my undergraduate days in the early 1990s.
This short (190-page) book shows how the global food system is intrinsically connected to world region’s diverse developmental trajectories, covering the colonial era to the green revolution to the contemporary corporate-dominated food system.
Historically, agriculture has been subordinated ever more tightly to capitalist imperatives of profit – based upon increased, faster, and cheaper production. Agriculture has been transformed from a ‘closed loop system’, where soil fertility was renewed based upon locally-available resources (such as animal manure), to a through-flow system dependent upon external inputs.
This shift raised yields for a while, but at the cost of soil exhaustion and the accumulation of power and resources in the hands of agrochemical companies at the expense of the small farmer sector.
Weis suggests that we need to consider new ways of producing our food, which would also establish new forms of world development.
The Global Food Economy examines the human and ecological cost of what we eat.
The current food economy is characterized by immense contradictions. Surplus 'food mountains', bountiful supermarkets, and rising levels of obesity stand in stark contrast to widespread hunger and malnutrition. Transnational companies dominate the market in food and benefit from subsidies, whilst farmers in developing countries remain impoverished. Food miles, mounting toxicity and the 'ecological hoofprint' of livestock mean that the global food economy rests on increasingly shaky environmental foundations.
This book looks at how such a system came about, and how it is being enforced by the…
As a teenager, I visited my uncle, who farmed rice in southern Haiti. I met a community that helped me understand that food is not just about dollars and cents—it’s about belonging, it’s about identity. This experience inspired me to become an aid worker. For the last 20+ years, I have worked to mend broken food systems all over the world. If we don’t get food right, hunger will threaten the social fabric.
I found that this book offers a great overview of the issues. I appreciate how the author breaks down the complex myriad forces shaping our agri-food systems into relatable anecdotes.
The author never gets lost in the numbers and stays focused on guiding the reader through the inequalities and power relations that define our food system. I found Patel’s writing always enjoyable.
"For anyone attempting to make sense of the world food crisis, or understand the links between U.S. farm policy and the ability of the world's poor to feed themselves, Stuffed and Starved is indispensable." —Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma
It’s a perverse fact of modern life: There are more starving people in the world than ever before, while there are also more people who are overweight.
To find out how we got to this point and what we can do about it, Raj Patel launched a comprehensive investigation into the global food network. It…
These books fall in line with my community of people who care for the Earth. They were my beginning influences to doing the work I have done over the past five decades and in the countries I have worked to teach people how to develop good stewardship practices on the land they worked. Community development is at the heart of what I do. Healing land heals us and helps us become more whole.
This book opened me up to how our food system and modern agribusiness work.
I read this while in between my studies in horticulture and agriculture. I was so taken by the book that I sought him out. I discovered that he was teaching organic horticulture at a small college down the coast near Santa Cruz. I went there and studied horticulture in his class. I gained a great deal of knowledge from him. He was a valuable resource.
I am an author and former environmental activist who dropped out of the ‘conflict industry’ in 1997 to start the Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a radical center among ranchers, environmentalists, scientists, and others around practices that improve resilience in working landscapes. For two decades, I worked on the front lines of collaborative conservation and regenerative agriculture, sharing innovative, land-based solutions to food, water, and climate challenges. I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Farmer and author Wendell Berry is a personal hero of mine. From his home in Kentucky, Berry has been writing about regenerative agriculture for decades. The Art of the Commonplace gathers together twenty of his best essays. They articulate a compelling vision for people dissatisfied with the stress, anxiety, disease, and destructiveness of contemporary life. Berry is also the author of numerous works of poetry and fiction.
"Here is a human being speaking with calm and sanity out of the wilderness. We would do well to hear him." ―The Washington Post Book World
The Art of the Commonplace gathers twenty essays by Wendell Berry that offer an agrarian alternative to our dominant urban culture. Grouped around five themes―an agrarian critique of culture, agrarian fundamentals, agrarian economics, agrarian religion, and geobiography―these essays promote a clearly defined and compelling vision important to all people dissatisfied with the stress, anxiety, disease, and destructiveness of contemporary American culture.
Why is agriculture becoming culturally irrelevant, and at what cost? What are the…
I have been enamored with archaeology and evolutions since childhood when my parents handed me my first book on these subjects: Ruth Moore's Man, Time and Fossils, and The Testimony of the Spade by Geoffrey Bibby. These themes have guided my study and teaching. I retired as a University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology in the SUNY system. I am the author or editor of eight books in areas related to this interest. My focus on archaeology and cultural evolution and my counter-intuitive conclusion that workload and illness often increased with the evolution of civilization were stimulated by the works of Lee and Boserup.
This book upended the common—and my—perception of progress in human agriculture. The common assumption was that the fortuitous invention of agricultural tools like the hoe, the plow, and fertilizer produced advances in human agriculture's productivity, permitting larger populations to be supported. Boserup argued that growing populations forced farming to be intensified by dramatically reducing fallow periods and demanding compensatory technological changes.
Stimulated by this book and aware of Lee’s work (above), I expanded her argument to include the origins and intensification of agriculture. Her concept of population “pressure” as a motivator of change underlies much of my later work.
When it first appeared in 1965, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth heralded a breakthrough in the theory of agricultural development. Whereas 'development' had previously been seen as the transformation of traditional communities by the introduction (or imposition) of new technologies, Ester Boserup argued that changes and improvements occur from within agricultural communities, and that improvements are governed not only by outside interference, but by those communities themselves.
Using extensive analyses of the costs and productivity of the main systems of traditional agriculture, Ester Boserup concludes that technical, economic and social changes are unlikely to take place unless the community concerned…
Several years ago I gave a paper - Human experiments in Teratogenicity - a brief exploration of the use of herbicides in the Vietnam. I was accused of and being a traitor to my discipline and siding with the environmentalists who wanted to diminish herbicide use in agriculture. I wasn't guilty as charged. The accusation encouraged me to explore agriculture's values and ethical foundation. I have continued to explore the ethics of agriculture, question the ethics of the whole agricultural enterprise. I've written, learned, and thought about the application of moral philosophy to agriculture. The book selected will help readers think about the questions and guide those interested in pursuing the application of moral philosophy to agriculture.
Wendell Berry is a Kentucky farmer, a prolific author, an environmental activist, cultural critic, and poet.
In this book, one of his many, he raises important questions about the practice of agriculture in the United States and some of the consequences including loss of small farms and communities, the ecological effects, energy use, and agriculture's externalities.
His work has been largely ignored by the agricultural community including most faculty in colleges of agriculture.
He writes eloquently about his concern that man was not made to rule the world and his claim that to rule the world we must conquer it.
Humans and agriculture have conquered and ignored and externalized the cultural, environmental, and human costs, which Berry explores in detail. His work has not been ignored by the environmental community.
Since its publication in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural and spiritual discipline. Today’s agribusiness, however, takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families. As a result, we as a nation are more estranged from the land—from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it.
Sadly, his arguments and observations are more relevant than ever. Although “this book has not had the happy fate of being proved wrong,” Berry writes, there are people working “to make something comely…
