Here are 100 books that The Global Food Economy fans have personally recommended if you like
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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.
I’m writing this section just a couple of days after International Women’s Day (IWD).
IWD 2023 focussed on the gender gap in digital innovation. Closing this gap would contribute to progress in achieving substantive gender equality, but IWD organisers also argue, it would generate more economic growth.
This narrative is partial and ideological. It uses a fact (the gender gap) and a worthy objective (of eliminating that gap) to promote a particular conception of women – something that Naila Kabeer illuminates with great effect in Reversed Realities.
Part of the reason for socio-economic gender gaps is the amount of (often unpaid) time women spend caring for others. While care is foundational to what makes us human, in contemporary capitalist societies care work is devalued to the extent that much of it goes unpaid. Could it be otherwise?
Kabeer shows how so much ideology about gender equality is based upon the…
Reversed Realities uncovers the deeply entrenched, hence barely visible, biases which underpin mainstream development theory and account for the marginal status given to women's needs in current development policy. Naila Kabeer traces the emergence of 'women' as a specific category in development thought and examines alternative frameworks for analysing gender hierarchies. She identifies the household as a primary site for the construction of power relations and compares the extent to which gender inequalities are revealed in different approaches to the concept of the family unit. The book assesses the inadequacies of the poverty line as a measuring tool and provides…
Economic history is, quite simply, my job: I write about it, I research it, and I’ve been teaching it for ten years at a small liberal arts college in New England. I’ve always felt that the best way to make sense of economic change is not by studying formal laws but by reading what past actors have left behind. Numbers and statistics are indispensable, but they acquire meaning only in relation to ideas and power. In any case, that’s what I take the books on this list to suggest. I think of these books—and others like them—as trusty companions. Perhaps you will, too.
One of my favorite history books of all time. Why did slavery end? This classic masterpiece still has the most compelling explanation: not because our better natures won out but because a sea change in political economy—from mercantilism to industrial capitalism—made slavery obsolete.
In my work as a historian, I still aspire to pull off something resembling Williams’s fearless, elegant, and sobering style of argument.
Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established…
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.
We need to transform contemporary notions and practices of social change if we are to achieve genuine human development without destroying the planet.
This book by John Bellamy Foster deploys the concept of the metabolic rift to explain how capitalism is a fundamentally unsustainable economic system, subordinating nature ever more to its rhythms of competitive capital accumulation.
The greatest costs of environmental destruction – desertification, droughts, chemical contamination, flooding – are shouldered by the world’s poorest people who have already suffered from the impacts of colonialism and exploitative trade relations with more powerful states and economies.
Foster offers a vision of an alternative future where we meet all of humanity’s needs through caring for the planet’s environment.
Explores capitalism's role in creating the current state of climate emergency
Over the last 11,700 years, during which human civilization developed, the earth has existed within what geologists refer to as the Holocene Epoch. Now science is telling us that the Holocene Epoch in the geological time scale ended, replaced by a new more dangerous Anthropocene Epoch, which began around 1950. The Anthropocene Epoch is characterized by an "anthropogenic rift" in the biological cycles of the Earth System, marking a changed reality in which human activities are now the main geological force impacting the earth as a whole, generating at…
I began advocating for the rights of California prisoners and their families while incarcerated. As co-director of Legal Services for Prisoners with Children (LSPC), in 2003, I cofounded All of Us or None (AOUON), a grassroots movement of formerly incarcerated people working on their own behalf to secure their civil and human rights. AOUON is now the policy and advocacy arm of LSPC, which I have led as executive director since 2011. Collective victories include ending indefinite solitary confinement in California, expanding access to housing and employment for formerly incarcerated people, and restoring the vote to those on parole and probation.
Fanon’s analysis of how Black people in colonized Africa and in the United States were one oppressed people was part of my political education. This book was formative to my politics, which are rooted in Fanon’s combination of Marxism and resistance to racial oppression.
Reading Fanon allowed me to accept my culture and who I was as a Black person. I started reflecting on assimilation and how we changed our hair and skin to look more acceptable to white people. He was also my friend Nate’s favorite author.
After Nate got out of prison, he became an attorney and director of prisoner legal services at the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department. There’s a memorial to him there still, in the jail lobby, and Fanon’s book is in there.
First published in 1961, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is a masterful and timeless interrogation of race, colonialism, psychological trauma, and revolutionary struggle. In 2020, it found a new readership in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests and the centering of narratives interrogating race by Black writers. Bearing singular insight into the rage and frustration of colonized peoples, and the role of violence in spurring historical change, the book incisively attacks the twin perils of post-independence colonial politics: the disenfranchisement of the masses by the elites on the one hand, and intertribal and interfaith animosities on…
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…
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 one because it reveals what is wrong with modern meat production, not only within the broad context of industrial agriculture but also the governmental policies and corporate control of what we eat.
It ranges widely from corporate control of plant and animal genetics to who raises what we eat and dictates where and how it is grown, to the chemicals that go onto our fruits and vegetables and into our bodies, to government oversight and regulation of food safety and animal welfare; to corporate concentration at every link in the food chain.
But what I appreciate most of all is Hauter’s extensive and thoughtful analysis of what can be done to break up the foodopolies and rebuild a healthy and just food system.
Wenonah Hauter runs an organic family farm in Northern Virginia that provides healthy vegetables to over five hundred families. Despite this, as one of the nation's leading healthy food advocates, Hauter believes that the local food movement is not enough to solve America's food crisis and the public health debacle it has created. In Foodopoly, she takes aim at the real culprit: the massive consolidation and corporate control of food production, which prevents farmers from raising healthy crops and limits the choices that people can make in the grocery store.
I am a food writer who has long been interested in seeing food in its cultural, historical, and social context. Food is too often put in a neat little box, whereas actually it offers a fascinating prism through which to explore the world. Researching and writing The Missing Ingredient – in which I explore the role of time as the universal, invisible ‘ingredient’ in the food we grow, make, and cook brought this home to me.
Such an important, relevant, and well-written book. Carolyn Steel traces the journey food takes to feed our cities – from the land where it is grown to the waste dumps, where its decay causes environmental degradation. It is a book that looks forward as well as to the past. Hungry City ends with a rallying cry to create a better food system – better for us, for society, for the planet. ‘How food shapes our lives in our future is up to us,’ writes Steel.
*According to the Trussell Trust, food bank use between April and Sept 2018 was up 13% on the same period in 2017.*
*Every year in the UK 18 million tonnes of food end up in landfill.*
Why is this the case and what can we do about it?
The relationship between food and cities is fundamental to our everyday lives. Food shapes cities and through them it moulds us - along with the countryside that feeds us. Yet few of us are conscious of the process and we rarely stop to wonder how food reaches our plates.
I'm a research scientist who has worked on the interface of many biological, environmental, social, and economic disciplines seeking more sustainable and yet productive forms of agriculture in the tropics and subtropics. With numerous colleagues, I've tried to find ways to right many of the wrongs that have affected the critical food and non-food needs of the world’s poorest and marginalized farmers. This also has the potential to heal much of the environmental degradation and social deprivation in our troubled and dysfunctional world. Along the way, I've had an unusual and privileged research career travelling in remote corners of the world and meeting the people most in need of help from international decision makers.
This ‘wake-up’ call to society about the food crisis already affecting one billion people provides both information and guidance about what needs to be done to avert disaster.
It is also full of important philosophy, such as “There can be no peace until people have enough to eat.” The book goes on to offer important insights into what needs to be done for humanity to live sustainably.
The task is enormous, but there is hope if we wake from our slumbers.
In "The Coming Famine", Julian Cribb lays out a vivid picture of impending planetary crisis - a global food shortage that threatens to hit by mid-century - that would dwarf any in our previous experience. Cribb's comprehensive assessment describes a dangerous confluence of shortages - of water, land, energy, technology, and knowledge - combined with the increased demand created by population and economic growth. Writing in brisk, accessible prose, Cribb explains how the food system interacts with the environment and with armed conflict, poverty, and other societal factors. He shows how high food prices and regional shortages are already sending…
I was lucky enough to be introduced to medieval Welsh literature when I was an undergraduate, and the Welsh language mesmerised me. It is so unlike any other language that I had come across and translating texts from Welsh into English was as absorbing as code-cracking. My apprenticeship as a scholar was long and hard and I soon realised that my particular contribution was to make Welsh literature accessible to non-Welsh speakers, not simply through translations, but by aligning the Welsh tradition with the wider literary cultures of Europe. I want Wales and its two literatures to take their place as two of the great literatures of Europe.
I’m not particularly a foodie, but this book was an eye-opener.
Carwyn Graves takes us on a historical and topographical journey around Wales uncovering one of its best-kept secrets, its traditional and inventive cuisine. I discovered that there is definitely more to Welsh cooking than the famous Welsh rarebit or even the ubiquitous Welsh cakes (enjoyable though they are).
The book is structured around key foods from the Welsh menu, including Bara/Bread, Caws/Cheese, and Cig Oen/Lamb. The emphasis is on fresh natural foods, though the final chapter on Sglodion/Chips rather gives the game away.
Welsh Food Stories explores more than two thousand years of history to discover the rich but forgotten heritage of Welsh foods - from oysters to cider, salted butter to salt-marsh lamb. Despite centuries of industry, ancient traditions have survived in pockets across the country among farmers, bakers, fisherfolk, brewers and growers who are taking Welsh food back to its roots, and trailblazing truly sustainable foods as they do so.
In this important book, author Carwyn Graves travels Wales to uncover the country's traditional foods and meet the people making them today. There are the owners of a local Carmarthenshire chip…
