Here are 100 books that Salt Sugar Fat fans have personally recommended if you like
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Sometimes I feel like we know more about the anthropologies of ancient civilizations and remote tribes than about the business most people do every day. There's mystery behind the curtain. To me, good nonfiction that goes deep inside a business is about our culture and how our world works. It's a way to understand everything we interact with and how it got there. I have enjoyed telling specific business creation stories as a business journalist, but understanding what truly turns the gears has informed writing I have done on every subject, including my humor.
This book reveals a substantial but obscure piece of the world economy. It's gonna blow your mind how much grains influence the world. Corn is in food and packaging and gasoline. Palm oil is in everything. Wheat, rice, soybeans…apparently billions of people eat this stuff. Commodities futures trading is about high finance but also farming, land use, biotech, politics, and climate change. Kingsman is a lively writer, considering he's a career commodities trader, and he interviews insiders at companies including the "ABCD" giants -- ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Dreyfus (of the Julia Louis-Dreyfuses).
In 1979, Dan Morgan, a journalist with the Washington Post, wrote Merchants of Grain, a definitive history of the international grain trade. In the 40 years since Dan’s book was published the grain markets have changed almost beyond recognition. So too have the merchants of grain. Once shadowy figures, grain merchants have now come out of the shadows. Almost everything that you eat or drink today will contain something bought, stored, transported, processed, shipped, distributed or sold by one of the seven giants of the agricultural supply chain. The media often refers to them as the ABCD group of international…
Sometimes I feel like we know more about the anthropologies of ancient civilizations and remote tribes than about the business most people do every day. There's mystery behind the curtain. To me, good nonfiction that goes deep inside a business is about our culture and how our world works. It's a way to understand everything we interact with and how it got there. I have enjoyed telling specific business creation stories as a business journalist, but understanding what truly turns the gears has informed writing I have done on every subject, including my humor.
The title is a trick, probably the publisher's idea. Dennis (who passed away in 2014) expresses qualms about the whole getting rich idea. Before becoming a magazine multimillionaire (The Week, Maxim, Stuff) he was a poet, jailed in 1971 for editing an obscene humor magazine. He borrowed to start his publishing empire with Cozmic Comics and Kung Fu Monthly. He writes that anyone can raise capital -- you just need enough confidence in your plan to grovel and risk your friends' money. I forever carry his advice on negotiation: whoever cares less wins. Negotiate hard, be sure about what you'd like, but be ready to walk away, because no deal is a must-do.
'Making money is a knack, a knack that can be acquired. And if someone like me can become rich, then so can you - no matter what your present circumstances. Here is how I did it and what I learned along the way.' So writes Felix Dennis, who believes that almost anyone of reasonable intelligence can become rich, given sufficient motivation and application.
How To Get Rich is a distillation of his business wisdom. Primarily concerned with the step-by-step creation of wealth, it ruthlessly dissects the business failures and financial triumphs of 'a South London lad who became rich virtually…
I'm the New York Times' Global Economics Correspondent. Over the course of three decades in journalism, I have reported from more than 40 countries, including a six-year stint in China for the Washington Post and five years in London for the Times. I have ridden with truck drivers from Texas to India, visited factories and warehouses from Argentina to Kenya, and explored ports from Los Angeles to Rotterdam.
Like any student of globalization, I love this book because it focuses like a laser on how a single critical innovation—the development of the shipping container—effectively shrank the oceans, accelerated the pace of sea cargo, and made it possible for consumers to depend on faraway factories.
In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried fifty-eight shipping containers from Newark to Houston. From that modest beginning, container shipping developed into a huge industry that made the boom in global trade possible. The Box tells the dramatic story of the container's creation, the decade of struggle before it was widely adopted, and the sweeping economic consequences of the sharp fall in transportation costs that containerization brought about. But the container didn't just happen. Its adoption required huge sums of money, both from private investors and from ports that aspired to be on the leading edge of a new…
Sometimes I feel like we know more about the anthropologies of ancient civilizations and remote tribes than about the business most people do every day. There's mystery behind the curtain. To me, good nonfiction that goes deep inside a business is about our culture and how our world works. It's a way to understand everything we interact with and how it got there. I have enjoyed telling specific business creation stories as a business journalist, but understanding what truly turns the gears has informed writing I have done on every subject, including my humor.
Sorry, it's another behind-the-scenes food book on my list. But food is something we all like to eat, and we ought to know how it happens. Lorr rips into the way supermarkets choose foods based on profit margins, shelf appeal, and turnover rather than necessarily tasting great, or being healthful. And also on lucrative "slotting fees" -- manufacturers paying to have products on the shelves. Lorr saves special spite for the way the trucking industry exploits drivers. His histories of grocery chains like Trader Joe's and ALDI are fascinating, and he gets a job at Whole Foods, where he learns the magic phrase employees are trained to say to cranky or bothersome customers: "Sounds important!"
"A deeply curious and evenhanded report on our national appetites." --The New York Times
In the tradition of Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma, an extraordinary investigation into the human lives at the heart of the American grocery store
The miracle of the supermarket has never been more apparent. Like the doctors and nurses who care for the sick, suddenly the men and women who stock our shelves and operate our warehouses are understood as 'essential' workers, providing a quality of life we all too easily take for granted. But the sad truth is that the grocery industry has…
I became fascinated by the intersection of food, sustainable agriculture, and culture when I moved to Iowa. I had long been an environmentalist, but moving to the land of big corn forced me to rethink food production. I wrote a book that explored agricultural narratives in India (Growing Stores from India) and developed a class on Religion and Food. I then became curious about how people and communities translate their values of sustainability into practice. For example, how do you decide what to eat, and who gets to decide? These books helped me think about links between food, sustainability, and culture and the power to decide what to eat.
What should we eat, and how do we choose? Where does our food come from?
In Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan traces the origins of four meals to help answer this question. Each of these meals represents a food production system, big organic, industrial agriculture, for example. He takes us from a McDonald’s meal (hint: it’s corn) to a hunt.
In reading this book, I especially loved his investigative journalism, how he explored the environmental, social, and economic ramifications of each food and its system of production.
The New York Times bestseller that's changing America's diet is now perfect for younger readers
"What's for dinner?" seemed like a simple question-until journalist and supermarket detective Michael Pollan delved behind the scenes. From fast food and big organic to small farms and old-fashioned hunting and gathering, this young readers' adaptation of Pollan's famous food-chain exploration encourages kids to consider the personal and global health implications of their food choices.
In a smart, compelling format with updated facts, plenty of photos, graphs, and visuals, as well as a new afterword and backmatter, The Omnivore's Dilemma serves up a bold message…
I have been reading, researching, and writing on the limitations of market capitalism and the unique and important role of government in meeting public needs for almost 30 years. I have come to firmly believe that we can’t – as a nation and planet – solve our most pressing problems without rebuilding trust in government and the capacity and authority of governing institutions. We can’t eliminate poverty, eradicate structural racism, protect our environment and the planet without democratic institutions that have the power to do so. We need markets, but transferring too much power to the market has created many of the problems we face today.
This book had an enormous impact on my understanding about the long road economic conservatives and corporations took to establish the dominance of neoclassical and neoliberal economic approaches in the U.S.
It tells a detailed story about a small group of American businessmen who ultimately succeeded in building a political movement that transformed the country. It describes what they were heading for and the ways they went about it.
In the wake of the profound economic crisis known as the Great Depression, a group of high-powered individuals joined forces to campaign against the New Deal-not just its practical policies but the foundations of its economic philosophy. The titans of the National Association of Manufacturers and the chemicals giant DuPont, together with little-known men like W. C. Mullendore, Leonard Read, and Jasper Crane, championed European thinkers Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises and their fears of the "nanny state." Through fervent activism, fundraising, and institution-building, these men sought to educate and organize their peers as a political force to…
My world is motivated by food: what to eat, when to eat, where to eat. At least since I was 12, when I was diagnosed with Type-1 diabetes. This is when I learned the “boring” things like carbs, fat, protein, and fiber. Scrutiny of my diet, and the food I ate, became a passion and finally my career. Not only in what I buy at the grocery store or put on my plate, but in the topics I write about. For me, food comes with its life-sustaining compliment: Insulin. How will techno foods be processed in my body? This question drives me to understand future foods at a molecular level, and then to share what I’ve learned in my writing.
Ever wonder why it’s so hard to stop eating a bag of chips? It’s because this “stuff” has been engineered to make us overeat.
Why do food companies want us to eat more than we need? Because our over-caloric consumption equals profits. It’s complicated stuff but Mark Schatzker illuminates what’s behind this crafty food engineering in an eminently readable book about food and flavor science.
If you’re like me you’ll be happy to learn the underpinnings of our food systems, even when it’s not so flattering.
A lively argument from award-winning journalist proving the key to reversing health crisis lies in the overlooked link between nutrition and flavour: "The Dorito Effect is one of the most important health and food books I have read" (Dr. David B. Agus, New York Times bestselling author). We are in the grip of a food crisis. Obesity has become a leading cause of preventable death, after only smoking. For nearly half a century we've been trying to pin the blame somewhere, fat, carbs, sugar, wheat, high-fructose corn syrup. But that search has been in vain, because the food problem that's…
I have spent my entire adult life wondering if my world would be different if I hadn’t spent my teens and twenties on antidepressants. What I know for sure is that the person I am after psychiatric drugs is wildly different than the person I was while medicated, which has led me down a path of understanding the history and cultural significance of psychiatric drugs to understand my own story. Now, I am an advocate for safe psychiatric drug deprescribing education. My goal is to teach patients and parents how to ask their doctors the right questions, encourage true informed consent, and make prescribers aware of the signs and symptoms of over-medication and psychiatric drug withdrawal.
There is an uncomfortable question in the world of mental health and treatment that everyone thinks about, but no one says out loud: If medicating mental illness with psychiatric drugs was really working, why are people getting worse?
This book examines over fifty years of research to find the answer and comes to a startling conclusion. I think it is the single most comprehensive and explanatory book on the market about the true nature and outcomes of psychiatric drugs and that it should be required reading in all medical schools.
It is also divided into multiple diagnoses (schizophrenia, bipolar, depression, and ADHD), which I found particularly useful as someone who focuses mostly on the history and treatment of depression.
Updated with bonus material, including a new foreword and afterword with new research, this New York Times bestseller is essential reading for a time when mental health is constantly in the news.
In this astonishing and startling book, award-winning science and history writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled over the past two decades?
Interwoven with Whitaker’s groundbreaking analysis of the merits of psychiatric medications are the personal stories of children and adults swept up in this epidemic. As Anatomy of an Epidemic reveals, other societies have…
During my career, when someone asked if I had read a particular book on mental health, my reaction was “why would I read interpretive books when I already read the actual studies on which those books are based?” Eventually, I began to discover what I had been missing. There are many excellent books that enhanced my knowledge of mental health and nutrition, and I am grateful for many more than the five listed here. But even so, in 2020 Julia and I concluded that there was a huge gap in the books available --- so we wrote The Better Brain to educate people about what micronutrients do in our brains.
Dr. Weil is a true pioneer of trying to educate both the general public and health clinicians about non-drug approaches to improving health. He has published a couple of dozen books to share his knowledge about botanicals, nutrients, true food, inflammation --- as well as other integrative skills and knowledge (breathing, meditation). The reason I selected this book to highlight is because it reminds us of the range of human emotions that are ‘normal’: as he says, it is not realistic to expect to be happy all the time. But eating a diet of healthy whole foods, avoiding ultra-processed products, and using supplements as needed --- these steps can improve our society’s mental health.
Dr Andrew Weil charts a new path to finding lasting happiness Everyone wants to be happy. But what does that really mean? Increasingly, scientific evidence shows us that true satisfaction and well-being come only from within. Dr Andrew Weil has proven that the best way to maintain optimum physical health is to draw on both conventional and alternative medicine. Now, in Spontaneous Happiness, he gives us the foundation for attaining and sustaining optimum emotional health. Rooted in Dr Weil's pioneering work in integrative medicine, the book suggests a reinterpretation of the notion of happiness, discussing the limitations of modern medicine…
Since 2008, I have conducted research on themes related to International Political Economy. I am currently the co-chair of the research committee on this topic at the International Political Science Association (IPSA) and am passionate about making sense of the interplay between material and symbolic factors that shape capitalism and globalisation. Being based in Brazil, I was stuck when the country—which did not have salient identity cleavages in politics—came to be, after 2008, a hotspot of religious-based right-wing populism associated with the defence of trade liberalisation as globalisation started to face meaningful backlash from White-majority constituencies who are relatively losers of the post-Cold War order in the advanced industrialised democracies.
In a time when industrial policy is no longer taboo, even in the West, I would recommend this book to remember the pivotal role that state policies play in promoting development.
More than being the result of self-made people, crucial innovations like the smartphone result from the research backbone that the state provides.
The book is, therefore, thought-provoking as it debunks myths of state decline during the so-called neoliberal age, although recognises that private firms have acquired excessive power.
In this sharp and controversial expose, Mariana Mazzucato debunks the pervasive myth that the state is a laggard, bureaucratic apparatus at odds with a dynamic private sector. She reveals in detailed case studies, including a riveting chapter on the iPhone, that the opposite is true: the state is, and has been, our boldest and most valuable innovator. Denying this history is leading us down the wrong path. A select few get credit for what is an intensely collective effort, and the US government has started disinvesting from innovation. The repercussions could stunt economic growth and increase inequality. Mazzucato teaches us…
