Here are 34 books that Slow Cooked fans have personally recommended if you like
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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.
In Fast Food Nation, journalist Eric Schlosser traces the growth of fast food across the US and shows how franchises have standardized both agricultural and social life in the process.
As the demand for McDonalds’ fries and hamburgers soared, for example, farmers adapted potato and meat production to strict new specifications. Similarly, fast food franchises reshaped labor practices in the process.
Schlosser’s book was the first to reveal the extent to which fast food changed environmental, social, and health landscapes in the US. And, more important, we see how much fast food—which promises choice—has instead reduced agricultural biodiversity and food choice in the process.
Now the subject of a film by Richard Linklater, Eric Schlosser's explosive bestseller Fast Food Nation: What the All-American Meal is Doing to the World tells the story of our love affair with fast food.
Britain eats more fast food than any other country in Europe. It looks good, tastes good, and it's cheap. But the real cost never appears on the menu.
Eric Schlosser visits the lab that re-creates the smell of strawberries; examines the safety records of abattoirs; reveals why the fries really taste so good and what lurks between the sesame buns - and shows how fast…
I’m an investigative journalist who focuses on the intersection of finance, wealth accounting, and climate change. I head up food and agriculture coverage at Forbes, and have been reporting on the wealth and power hiding within the food industry for nearly a decade. I’ve been called a billionaire whisperer, and have a knack for getting folks to talk. Based in New York City, I’m a member of a Lower East Side community-supported agriculture share and keep composting worms on my terrace garden.
This book, in many ways, is the spiritual grandfather to mine. Christopher Leonard is a pioneer: He went to a level of detail that no one had before. His deep investigation of Tyson Foods is a formative example of how corporations pick profits over their farmers and use their power to exert control over producers, workers, and suppliers. It has informed my research time and time again.
An investigative journalist takes you inside the corporate meat industry—a shocking, in-depth report every American should read.
How much do you know about the meat on your dinner plate? Journalist Christopher Leonard spent more than a decade covering the country’s biggest meat companies, including four years as the national agribusiness reporter for the Associated Press. Now he delivers the first comprehensive look inside the industrial meat system, exposing how a handful of companies executed an audacious corporate takeover of the nation’s meat supply.
Leonard’s revealing account shines a light on the inner workings of Tyson Foods, a pioneer of the…
I have always been enamored with the natural world and how it works. This trait, among others, led me into the fields of biology, natural history, and environmental planning. Even as I witness our species chiseling away at the planet, I find hope and solace. Working alongside the tenacity and resiliency of plants, animals, and soil microbes, I've helped landscapes as large as a river basin and as small as a garden come to life and flourish. Give nature half a chance and she can do wonders.
This book unfolds a long and brilliant argument drawn from Provenza's decades of academic research and experience with domesticated ruminants—cows, sheep, and goats. Turns out these animals are not dumb.
In healthy pastures and rangelands Provenza illustrates their ability to select a diet of plants that provide sufficient calories, balanced nutrients, and perhaps most important, a mix of plant-made compounds that underpin normal immunity. Provenza calls this "body wisdom."
Like ruminants, we too have body wisdom. But, the steady infiltration of ultra-processed foods into the human diet challenges body wisdom with mixed messages. While our brains get high, our cells remain malnourished. This book is a rich and extensive immersion that will transform your thinking. It's eye-opening and mind-expanding in all the best ways.
"Nourishment will change the way you eat and the way you think."-Mark Schatzker, author of The Dorito Effect
"[Provenza is] a wise observer of the land and the animals [and] becomes transformed to learn the meaning of life."-Temple Grandin
Reflections on feeding body and spirit in a world of change
Animal scientists have long considered domestic livestock to be too dumb to know how to eat right, but the lifetime research of animal behaviorist Fred Provenza and his colleagues has debunked this myth. Their work shows that when given a choice of natural foods, livestock have an astoundingly refined palate,…
I’m an investigative journalist who focuses on the intersection of finance, wealth accounting, and climate change. I head up food and agriculture coverage at Forbes, and have been reporting on the wealth and power hiding within the food industry for nearly a decade. I’ve been called a billionaire whisperer, and have a knack for getting folks to talk. Based in New York City, I’m a member of a Lower East Side community-supported agriculture share and keep composting worms on my terrace garden.
Livestock eat a lot of corn and soy, and Matthew David Roth shares the detailed history of how industry fueled that rise over only a few decades. I found the primary documents and deep research Roth cites to be illuminating. I write about how monoculture like commodity soy has had devastating impacts on the soil and waterways across the U.S. This book was key to my research because it’s so important to understand how we got here.
At the turn of the twentieth century, soybeans grew on so little of America's land that nobody bothered to track the total. By the year 2000, they covered upward of 70 million acres, second only to corn, and had become the nation's largest cash crop. How this little-known Chinese transplant, initially grown chiefly for forage, turned into a ubiquitous component of American farming, culture, and cuisine is the story Matthew Roth tells in Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America.
The soybean's journey from one continent into the heart of another was by no means assured or predictable. In…
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.
I didn’t know how much I didn’t know about food until reading this book.
Marion Nestle is a writer who doesn’t back down from a fight. She says exactly what she thinks. Nestle, a professor emerita at New York University, has been writing about the industry for decades and she understands deeply what food marketers are doing when they try to sell us junk food or when an academic study is funded by the very companies that benefit from “positive results” found in the study.
She helps readers (like me!) understand what we should be eating while simultaneously giving us a better grip on all the food-like stuff we’re told to eat. This book will make you feel better about what you put on your plate.
We all witness, in advertising and on supermarket shelves, the fierce competition for our food dollars. In this engrossing expose, Marion Nestle goes behind the scenes to reveal how the competition really works and how it affects our health. The abundance of food in the United States - enough calories to meet the needs of every man, woman, and child twice over - has a downside. Our over-efficient food industry must do everything possible to persuade people to eat more - more food, more often, and in larger portions - no matter what it does to waistlines or well-being. Like…
I started my career as an academic social scientist and seem set to end it as a gardener, small-scale farmer, and accidental ecological activist. I’ve learned a lot of things along the way from these different parts of my life that I channel in my writing. I don’t claim much expertise. In fact, I think claims to expert knowledge that can ‘solve’ modern problems are a big part of our modern problems. I’ve always been interested in how people and communities try to figure things out for themselves, often by picking up the pieces when big ideas have failed them. My writing arises out of that.
If there were justice in this world, Simon Fairlie would be a national treasure. A life lived at the margins of polite society informs his magnum opus Meat, which is only partly about meat and livestock.
At a deeper level, it’s about what a sensible, fair, renewable, and low-impact society would look like in modern Britain – the answer in a nutshell being a society substantially of small mixed farms geared to local needs. Forensic data analysis, deep historical knowledge, a conversational style, and a rare wit combine to make this book a classic of modern agricultural writing.
Meat is a groundbreaking exploration of the difficult environmental, ethical and health issues surrounding the human consumption of animals. Garnering huge praise in the UK, this is a book that answers the question: should we be farming animals, or not? Not a simple answer, but one that takes all views on meat eating into account. It lays out in detail the reasons why we must indeed decrease the amount of meat we eat, both for the planet and for ourselves, and yet explores how different forms of agriculture--including livestock--shape our landscape and culture.At the heart of this book, Simon Fairlie…
My life's work has been to educate and encourage others to take food into their own hands with the intention of reclaiming real nutrition and declaring independence from the conventional food system. I'm humbled by the fact that my DIY Kombucha business has been successful, and it means that enough people are realizing the importance of intentionality when considering the food and drink we put in our bodies. I'd say that our motto of "Changing the world, one gut at a time" accurately represents what we're doing every day.
With veganism and vegetarianism on the rise,
it's books like these that make an important case for keeping meat, especially
beef, in our diet. While reputable science is the backbone of the book, it also
takes a look at the ethical arguments for keeping local cattle ranching alive,
the use of natural fertilizers produced by farm animals, and delicious beef on
our plates.
We're told that if we care about our health-or our planet-eliminating red meat from our diets is crucial. That beef is bad for us and cattle farming is horrible for the environment. But science says otherwise.
Beef is framed as the most environmentally destructive and least healthy of meats. We're often told that the only solution is to reduce or quit red meat entirely. But despite what anti-meat groups, vegan celebrities, and some health experts say, plant-based agriculture is far from a perfect solution.
In Sacred Cow, registered dietitian Diana Rodgers and former research biochemist and New York Times bestselling…
Innovators long have fascinated me. I helped launch a clean-energy startup and advance legislation promoting environmental entrepreneurs. I’ve written biographies of Nikola Tesla (who gave us electric motors, radio, and remote controls) Jacques Cousteau (inventor of the Aqua Lung and master of undersea filming) and George Fabyan (pioneer of modern cryptography and acoustics), as well as a history of electricity (From Edison to Enron). I love reading (and writing) about ingenious and industrious individuals striving to achieve their dreams.
Here’s another engaging tale of the entrepreneurs and renegades fighting to bring lab-grown, cell-cultured meat to the world. I appreciated Purdy’s description of this competition as an “edible space race,” and unlike my other highlighted book, Billion Dollar Burger highlights the “difficult regulatory landscape” concocted by Big Meat lobbyists trying to keep protein alternatives off the shelves. He outlines ways to overcome that opposition and create healthier, more sustainable, and more humane food options.
A fast-paced, gripping insider account of the entrepreneurs and renegades racing to bring lab-grown meat to the world.
The trillion-dollar meat industry is one of our greatest environmental hazards; it pollutes more than all the world's fossil-fuel-powered cars. Global animal agriculture is responsible for deforestation, soil erosion and more emissions than air travel, paper mills and coal mining combined. It also depends on the slaughter of more than 60 billion animals per year, a number that is only increasing as the global appetite for meat swells. The whole world seems to be sleepwalking into a food crisis.
I'm the author of three novels, several short stories, and quite a few articles about writing and literature. While I haven't aimed to write for a specific genre—all three of my novels are different in this respect—my plots usually focus on a mystery. I enjoy novels with strong, credible characters, which are based in a recognisable, everyday reality, but where bizarre events can turn the world upside down.
This laugh-out-loud crime mystery has a special place for me because I read it not long after migrating to Australia and, through the lead character, Murray Whelan (a political staffer who spends his time digging himself in and out of holes), I was not only introduced to Australian humour but also to a new way of viewing Melbourne, its politics, establishments, and suburbs. In Stiff, as with Shane Maloney's other books in this series, the city landscape is as much a character as Murray Whelan himself, and this sense of place adds a richness to the story that would be missing if it were merely treated as a backdrop.
Don’t you just hate it when someone tries to kill you and you don’t know why?
Single father Murray Whelan thinks the life of a parent and political operative is complicated enough. His ex is staking out the moral high ground for a custody battle, and rumors of an early election are starting to fly in the upper echelons of Australia’s Labor party. When a Turk is found snap-frozen in a local meat plant, Murray cops the job to head off possible fallout for his boss, Charlene Wills, a member of Parliament and the Minister for Industry. But the meat…
People tend to think of food as being simple and self-evident, or at least feel it should be. In fact, almost every aspect of modern food has been dramatically reshaped by science and technology. Something that fascinates me as a historian is thinking about past transformations in our foodways and how they explain the social tensions and political struggles we live with today. My book From Label to Table tells a biography of the food label, using it as a prism to explore Americans’ anxieties about industrial foodways. I found these books to be an excellent primer for understanding the emergence of America’s packaged food economy and its many problems.
Today most foods American consumers purchase are packaged. A hundred years ago this wasn’t so.
This is a dramatic change in how we get our food, what we know about it, and what we even think food is. Zeide’s book is an important read because she takes us through this with one of the earliest forms of packaged food: canned foods.
Her discussions of how the canning industry overcame food safety concerns with canned products and consumer resistance to the idea of canned as less fresh, less palatable, and cheap helped me to rethink the different ways a packaged food economy reshaped America’s foodways.
As someone researching food labeling, I was especially interested in how the canned food industry resisted and then embraced the idea of labels as a “window into the can.”
2019 James Beard Foundation Book Award winner: Reference, History, and Scholarship
A century and a half ago, when the food industry was first taking root, few consumers trusted packaged foods. Americans had just begun to shift away from eating foods that they grew themselves or purchased from neighbors. With the advent of canning, consumers were introduced to foods produced by unknown hands and packed in corrodible metal that seemed to defy the laws of nature by resisting decay.
Since that unpromising beginning, the American food supply has undergone a revolution, moving away from a system based on fresh, locally grown…
