Here are 100 books that Stuffed and Starved fans have personally recommended if you like
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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 this book to be well-written and well-documented. While it does not focus solely on food systems, it does explain how a lack of food contributed to the demise of the societies explored in this book, such as the Greenland Norse and Easter Island. Diamond offers a stark warning about how a weak food system can undermine an entire civilization.
From the author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive is a visionary study of the mysterious downfall of past civilizations.
Now in a revised edition with a new afterword, Jared Diamond's Collapse uncovers the secret behind why some societies flourish, while others founder - and what this means for our future.
What happened to the people who made the forlorn long-abandoned statues of Easter Island? What happened to the architects of the crumbling Maya pyramids? Will we go the same way, our skyscrapers one day standing derelict and overgrown like 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 Mike Davis’s book to be an essential exploration of the historical causes of global hunger. As an aid worker, I found his analysis of the politics of 19th-century hunger relief informative. Food crises often have strong political roots, and this book does an excellent job of putting those into perspective.
It is very well-researched and packed with facts and figures. This book is an essential, magisterial read in a world facing renewed conflict and climate change.
Examining a series of El Nino-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case…
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 appreciated the author’s voice as a farmer speaking from experience and from the heart. Writing from his tiny farm, Fukuoka pushes back with flair against emerging agro-food paradigms.
I also found this book to be a window into mid-20th century Japan, a culture and period I simply did not know much about. Perhaps the best part of the book is the author's withering rants against industrial, modern agriculture.
Call it “Zen and the Art of Farming” or a “Little Green Book,” Masanobu Fukuoka’s manifesto about farming, eating, and the limits of human knowledge presents a radical challenge to the global systems we rely on for our food. At the same time, it is a spiritual memoir of a man whose innovative system of cultivating the earth reflects a deep faith in the wholeness and balance of the natural world. As Wendell Berry writes in his preface, the book “is valuable to us because it is at once practical and philosophical. It is an inspiring, necessary book about agriculture…
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 read this novel in a single day when I was in high school. It is about a struggling farming community in Haiti that comes together against all odds to build a better future. This book is lively and told with compassion.
I found Roumain’s exploration of the Haitian psyche in this book revealing; it taught me much about rural Haitian culture. Reading this book at a young age put me on the path to becoming an aid worker focusing on food security. In fact, I dedicated my first book to the Masters of the Dew.
A new English-language edition of this novel, which tells of the traditional rural life and people of Haiti, dominated by the natural world. This is a deeply powerful story of the harsh existence of peasant farmers struggling in a world both beautiful and unforgiving. The tale begins with the return of Manuel, a prodigal son, to his aging parents homestead and the realities of subsistence agriculture in a drought-stricken region. He brings new ideas, with the potential to transform the lives of people in the community. He encounters old feuds and resistance to change but he persists, and his determination…
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…
I am an academic at the University of Oxford who specializes in international political economy, so I study this topic for a living! I am particularly interested in the politics of international cooperation and economic development. Growing up, I traveled extensively in developing countries across Asia and Africa, which inspired in me a deep curiosity about the determinants of sustained economic growth. I also spent much time in Geneva, where my father frequently worked with United Nations agencies. His anecdotes about these institutions each evening made me wonder what caused some of them to perform effectively and others to perform poorly—and how they could be improved.
I have long believed that development economists rely too heavily on reductive formal models that ignore on-the-ground realities and are backed by scant empirical evidence. This book makes a compelling case for observation—particularly in the form of randomized controlled trials that approximate scientific experiments “in the field.”
I admire its rigorous use of the scientific method to critique theoretical approaches that draw much of their legitimacy and influence from technical sophistication and abstraction.
Why do the poor borrow to save? Why do they miss out on free life-saving immunizations, but pay for unnecessary drugs? In Poor Economics , Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, two practical visionaries working toward ending world poverty, answer these questions from the ground. In a book the Wall Street Journal called marvellous, rewarding," the authors tell how the stress of living on less than 99 cents per day encourages the poor to make questionable decisions that feed,not fight,poverty. The result is a radical rethinking of the economics of poverty that offers a ringside view of the lives of…
When I lost a baby late in my pregnancy, I was overwhelmed by grief. And then I learned that tens of thousands of babies died every day from preventable causes. I couldn’t save my own baby, but I wanted to know how to help others. I joined the board of World Vision and then other groups, including Opportunity International, MAP International, and International Justice Mission. I took numerous trips to developing countries and eventually headed a foundation dedicated to maternal health. I listened to the stories of women and tried to tell them to the world through a variety of international publications. I'm forever grateful to those who changed the way I see the world.
Jacqueline Novogratz was a successful young woman with a promising career in banking who wanted to truly understand global poverty and find ways to tackle it.
This book tells not only the remarkable story of a favorite hand-knit blue sweater she donated in Virginia and saw again in Rwanda, but her own sometimes fumbling ways to connect her experiences to women living in poverty.
I love this book for its honesty and how the author shares her own mistakes as well as understandings.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A book of hope written by a practical idealist who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer when it comes to building a better world.”—Former U.S. senator Bill Bradley
Jacqueline Novogratz left a career in international banking to spend her life on a quest to understand global poverty and find powerful new ways of tackling it. From her first stumbling efforts as a young idealist venturing forth in Africa to the creation of the trailblazing organization she runs today, Novogratz tells gripping stories with unforgettable characters. She shows how traditional charity often fails, but how a…
Bann Seng Tan is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Ashoka University. His research interests are on the causes and effects of democratization, the politics of foreign aid, the political economy of natural disasters, aid in decentralization, resurgent authoritarianism, and the democratic peace. His policy proclivities revolve around the defence of the liberal world order. Democracy promotion is but one way to push against authoritarianism.
Development aid is a type of foreign aid that is directed at the economic development of recipient countries. The failures of government-to-government development aid in Africa are Moyo’s focus. She notes that Africa is the only region that is regressing in major socio-economic indicators. She argues such aid distorts African economies, enables corruption, and incubates a culture of aid dependency. African governments can afford not to provide public goods because their revenue is guaranteed by development aid. To remedy such externalities, Moyo wants to end development aid to Africa. Instead of aid, she prefers free trade with the West and foreign investment from China. This book is remarkable for its willingness to challenge the conventions in development aid. Sometimes, we need to call a spade a spade.
In the past fifty years, more than $1 trillion in development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Has this assistance improved the lives of Africans? No. In fact, across the continent, the recipients of this aid are not better off as a result of it, but worse—much worse.
In Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo describes the state of postwar development policy in Africa today and unflinchingly confronts one of the greatest myths of our time: that billions of dollars in aid sent from wealthy countries to developing African nations has helped to reduce poverty and increase growth. In…
Since I was a student, I have been fascinated with social and economic inequality–the more so because back then, my professors seemed to disregard this subject of study. So, I made it one of my own main areas of research: I simply needed to understand more about the nature and the causes of inequality in human societies. In recent years, I have been busy researching economic inequality in different historical settings, also looking at specific socioeconomic strata. I began with the poor, and more recently, I focused on the rich. In my list of recommendations, I included books that, I believe, are particularly insightful concerning wealth and the wealthy.
I have always loved Branko Milanović’s way of addressing complex topics in a very accessible and usually highly original way.
In this book, Milanović pays much attention to the rich and the super-rich and devises a way of comparing their wealth across the ages by asking this simple question: how much labour could they command in their own historical period and socio-economic context?
So, for example, Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest Roman of Caesar’s times, could, with the yearly income from his vast possessions, command the work of 32,000 people. But, as Milanović argues, today’s super-rich are richer than past ones–circa 2010, the richest person in the world was the telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim, who could command the work of 440,000 Mexicans.
Who is the richest person in the world, ever? Does where you were born affect how much money you'll earn over a lifetime? How would we know? Why- beyond the idle curiosity- do these questions even matter? In The Haves and the Have-Nots , Branko Milanovic, one of the world's leading experts on wealth, poverty, and the gap that separates them, explains these and other mysteries of how wealth is unevenly spread throughout our world, now and through time. Milanovic uses history, literature and stories straight out of today's newspapers, to discuss one of the major divisions in our social…
I moved to New York City in 1984 as homelessness, and the AIDS epidemic were crises all too visible to this newcomer. To my good fortune, my post-doctoral training included some of the earliest experts on mental illness and homelessness. This work became a career goal that has sustained me through almost 40 years of research using qualitative (in-depth) methods. Obtaining federal funding to support this work and mentoring many graduate students were extra benefits that I cherished. Along the way, I wrote a textbook on qualitative methods (now in its 3rd edition), co-authored a book about Housing First, and traveled to Delhi, India to study their ‘pavement dwellers’.
This book is admittedly old (published in 2003), but I find myself returning to it time and again as an important touchstone to understanding the origins and consequences of homelessness in America. Hopper is an anthropologist and activist, one of the first to study the ‘new’ epidemic of homelessness that appeared in the 1980s in cities like New York.
Hopper’s book traces the historical roots and consequences of the epidemic and is prescient in foretelling points of contention, such as the African-American racism underlying housing precarity. Far from the stilted reporting style of academic reporting, this book reads like a conversation and an invitation to learn more.
"It must be some kind of experiment or something, to see how long people can live without food, without shelter, without security."-homeless woman, Grand Central Station, winter
"Homelessness is a routine fact of life on the margins. Materially, it emerges out of a tangled but unmysterious mix of factors: scarce housing, poorly planned and badly implemented policies of relocation and support, dismal prospects of work, exhausted or alienated kin.... Any outreach worker could tell you that list would be incomplete without one more: how misery can come to prefer its own company."-from the book
