I’m a novelist and a teacher of writing. My books are fueled by curiosity above all else. I have no expertise in science, so I stand in wonder at complicated systems that remain mostly hidden to me. My interest in food is similarly recreational. I’m married to a great chef and cookbook author, so I’ve learned a lot by osmosis. But when I think back on the process of writing OnePotato, I have to give a lot of credit to my students. They seem to be part of a generation that’s genuinely passionate about eating in healthy, equitable, and sustainable ways. Much of my book was sparked by conversations in the classroom.
This is the newest book on my list, and it reads like a glimpse into the future. Zimberoff investigates big tech’s scramble to create eggs without chickens, milk without cows, and meat without animals. It’s remarkable in both its breadth and its access to key players. I mentioned my character’s struggle to balance nature and technology earlier. In this arena, the line is even finer. If there’s ever a sequel to my own book, it will surely explore alternative proteins.
The full inside story of the technology paradigm shift transforming the food we eat and who is making it
Ultra-processed and secretly produced foods are roaring back into vogue, cheered by consumers and investors because they are plant-based-often vegan-and help address societal issues. And as our food system leaps ahead to a sterilized lab of the future, we think we know more about our food than we ever did, but because so much is happening so rapidly, we actually know less. In Technically Food, investigative reporter Larissa Zimberoff pokes holes in the marketing mania behind today's changing food landscape and…
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…
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…
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 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 have always been fascinated with plants. Their shapes, their colors, their beauty, even the plants that are known to be harmful to humans (poison ivy, puncture vine) had appeal to me. Plants are, by far, the most prolific, the biggest, the oldest, the most complex of organisms. And yet, as a pre-med student, classes on botany were never recommended. Sad. These books delve into the complexity, the wonder of plants, and how they interact with humans. From the sheer poetic pronouncements of Michael Pollan to the straightforward prose of Richard Manning, here is a chance to see the breadth and depth; our rewards and struggles with the plant kingdom.
If you were ever curious about where your food comes from, the strain and effort and environmental costs associated with it, boy is this the book for you! I learned so, so much from reading this, and I assign chapters to my class every year. It is thoroughly researched, and addresses all the vulnerable points of the current food system—especially in industrial countries. I guarantee you will have a different perspective of where your food comes from after reading this book. It is nothing less than a call to change the current food system if we are to deal with climatic uncertainty.
The emergence of large-scale food production gave us unprecedented abundance - but at a steep and ultimately unsustainable price. Relentless cost-cutting has made our food systems vulnerable to contamination and disease. More than a billion people are overweight or obese, yet roughly the same number are still malnourished. Over-crowded countries like China are already planning for tightened global food supplies. As the world veers back to a time of hunger and uncertainty, Paul Roberts explores the vulnerable miracle of our modern food economy and pinpoints the decisions we must make to avoid the coming meltdown.
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.
The crux of this book – ‘the need of the moment’ – focuses on the critical role of agrobiodiversity.
It recognizes that the current tendency to focus on only 30 out of 30,000 edible plant species has ignored many wonderful and locally popular foods that are also crucial for healthy and productive farming systems.
The book illustrates a ‘light bulb’ moment for the future of agriculture with the recognition of the numerous untapped benefits of edible plant species that have been overlooked by modern science.
We are at a critical point in human history and that of the planet. In this book, a world leader in agricultural research, Professor Sayed Azam-Ali, proposes a radical transformation of our agrifood system. He argues that agriculture must be understood as part of global biodiversity and that food systems have cultural, nutritional, and social values beyond market price alone. He describes the perilous risks of relying on just four staple crops for most of our food and the consequences of our current agrifood model on human and planetary health.In plain language for the wider public, students, researchers, and policy…
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…
We
all eat because we must and often because we enjoy it.
We all need to
pay more attention to what we eat, where words come from, and what happens as we lose
some of the diversity of our food.
As we sacrifice diversity, we ALL sacrifice
the places and people who preserve ecological and dietary diversity. The author
this innumerable endangered foods and food cultures across the planet and
encourages us to think about why they’re important
What Saladino finds in his adventures are people with soul-deep relationships to their food. This is not the decadence or the preciousness we might associate with a word like “foodie,” but a form of reverence . . . Enchanting." ―Molly Young, The New York Times
Dan Saladino's Eating to Extinction is the prominent broadcaster’s pathbreaking tour of the world’s vanishing foods and his argument for why they matter now more than ever
Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. The numbers are stark: Of…
I got hooked on breastfeeding when, during my health visitor training, our class had a lecture from Drs. Penny and Andrew Stanway, who wrote the original Breast is Best. I breastfed my own children, became a breastfeeding counsellor and lactation consultant (IBCLC), and championed breastfeeding as a health visitor and midwife. I then worked for 14 years with the UNICEF UK Baby Friendly Initiative, teaching and supporting healthcare staff to improve standards of care for breastfeeding mothers and babies. Throughout, I gained a huge respect for babies’ abilities in relation to breastfeeding. This directly influenced my belief in their capacity to continue feeding themselves when they start solid food, which is my current focus.
Kimberly writes from personal experience and from the heart. She pulls no punches. Her book covers a lot of the obstacles you’d expect – societal attitudes to breastfeeding, the formula industry, and so on – but it’s her chapter on ‘the feminist fallacy’ that really spoke to me. I’ve always been baffled by the lack of support that feminist writers have shown for breastfeeding. They talk about it as a chore, as a restriction on women’s freedom, not as something amazing that a woman’s body can do. Kimberly challenges this thinking head on, fearlessly exposing the flawed thinking that has, in the name of equality, blindly followed an agenda set by men, with the result that motherhood is devalued and breastfeeding is framed as simply an issue of ‘choice’. Her conviction provides me with the hope that we can reverse this. Brilliant.
Breastfeeding. The mere mention of it has many mothers wracked with anxiety (how will I manage with work, other kids, what if I don't make enough milk?) or guilt about not doing it (will I be hurting my child ifl choose not to breastfeed? what will people think of me if I choose not to?). This hot-button issue is one we've talked about repeatedly in the media and in celebrity culture. Remember when Angelina Jolie posed for the cover of W nursing her new-born? Oh, the controversy! And when Barbara Walters complained about the woman breastfeeding next to her on…
