Fast Food Nation (2005)
Fast food has hastened the malling of our landscape, widened the chasm between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and propelled American cultural imperialism abroad. That’s a lengthy list of charges, but Eric Schlosser makes them stick with an artful mix of first-rate reportage, wry wit, and careful reasoning. Schlosser’s myth-shattering survey stretches from California’s subdivisions, where the business was born, to the industrial corridor along the New Jersey Turnpike, where many of fast food’s flavors are concocted. Along the way, he unearths a trove of fascinating, unsettling truths — from the unholy alliance between fast food and Hollywood to the seismic changes the industry has wrought in food production, popular culture, and even real estate.
Against the Grain: How Agriculture has Hijacked Civilization (2008)
For 290,000 years, we managed to meet that need as hunter-gatherers, a state in which Manning believes we were at our most human: at our smartest, strongest, most sensually alive. But our reliance on food made a secure supply deeply attractive,and eventually we embarked upon the agricultural experiment that has been the history of our past 10,000 years. Drawing on the work of anthropologists, biologists, archaeologists, and philosophers, along with his own travels, he argues that not only our ecological ills-overpopulation, erosion, pollution-but our social and emotional malaise are rooted in the devil’s bargain we made in our not-so-distant past. And he offers personal, achievable ways we might re-contour the path we have taken to resurrect what is most sustainable and sustaining in our own nature and the planet’s.
Sustainability in the Food Industry(2009)
Sustainability is beginning to transform the food industry with environmental, economic and social factors being considered, evaluated and implemented throughout the supply chain like never before. Sustainability in the Food Industry defines sustainability with a comprehensive review of the industry’s current approach to balancing environmental, economic and social considerations throughout the supply chain. In addition, tools and information are provided to enhance future progress. To achieve this, the book combines technical research summaries, case studies and marketing information. Coverage includes sustainability as it relates to: agricultural practices, food processing, distribution, waste management, packaging, life cycle analysis, food safety and health, environmental labeling, consumer insight and market demand, product development, practices in food manufacturing companies, food retailing and food service. An international group of authors covers the information from a global perspective. Sustainability in the Food Industry offers an overview of sustainable sources of impact and improvement, how they relate to the key sectors of the food industry and how programs may be implemented for further improvement.
Food Inc. (2009)
ood, Inc. is guaranteed to shake up our perceptions of what we eat. This powerful documentary deconstructing the corporate food industry in America was hailed by Entertainment Weekly as “more than a terrific movie—it’s an important movie.” Aided by expert commentators such as Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, the film poses questions such as: Where has my food come from, and who has processed it? What are the giant agribusinesses and what stake do they have in maintaining the status quo of food production and consumption? How can I feed my family healthy foods affordably? Expanding on the film’s themes, the book Food, Inc. will answer those questions through a series of challenging essays by leading experts and thinkers. This book will encourage those inspired by the film to learn more about the issues, and act to change the world.
Chew On This (2007)
In the New York Times bestseller Chew on This, Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson unwrap the fast-food industry to bring you a behind-the-scenes look at a business that both feeds and feeds off the young. Find out what really goes on at your favorite restaurants—and what lurks between those sesame seed buns.
Food Politics (2007)
An accessible and balanced account, Food Politics laid the groundwork for today’s food revolution and changed the way we respond to food industry marketing practices. Now, a new introduction and concluding chapter bring us up to date on the key events in that movement. This pathbreaking, prize-winning book helps us understand more clearly than ever before what we eat and why.
End of Food (2009)
Salmonella-tainted tomatoes, riots, and skyrocketing prices are only the latest in a series of food-related crises that have illuminated the failures of the modern food system. Paul Roberts investigates this system and presents a startling truth—how we make, market, and transport our food is no longer compatible with the billions of consumers the system was built to serve. The emergence of large-scale and efficient food production forever changed our relationship with food and ultimately left a vulnerable and paradoxical system in place. High-volume factory systems create new risks for food-borne illness; high-yield crops generate grain, produce, and meat of declining nutritional quality; and while nearly a billion people are overweight, roughly as many people are starving.
No-Nonsense Guide to World Food (2008)
With spiralling food prices and spreading social unrest this is a timely guide to the instability of industrialized food systems. Wayne Roberts traces the history of food production and consumption, and shows that in a system dominated by supermarkets and agri-business real food choices are becoming harder to make. This book asks all the right questions, and provides some of the answers, in a real, democratic debate about food. It shows how people and communities can take control from governments and corporations to organize themselves creatively to achieve ‘food sovereignty’ – a balanced, just and sustainable food system.
The Global Food Economy (2007)
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
Slow Food (2003)
How often in the course and crush of our daily lives do we afford ourselves moments to truly relish-to truly be present in-the act of preparing and eating food? For most of us, our enjoyment of food has fallen victim to the frenetic pace of our lives and to our increasing estrangement, in a complex commercial economy, from the natural processes by which food is grown and produced. Packaged, artificial, and unhealthful, fast food is only the most dramatic example of the degradation of food in our lives, and of the deeper threats to our cultural, political, and environmental well-being. Carlo Petrini decided to resist the steady march of fast food and all that it represents when he organized a protest against the building of a McDonald’s near the Spanish Steps in Rome. Three years later Petrini founded the International Slow Food Movement, renouncing not only fast food but also the overall pace of the “fast life.”
Everything I want to do is Illegal (2007)
Although Polyface farm has been glowingly featured in countless national print and video media, it would not exist if the USDA and the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services had their way. From a lifetime of noncompliance, frustration, humor, and passion come the behind-the-scenes real stories that have brought this little family farm into the forefront of the non-industrial food system.
All You Can Eat (2008)
With biting wit and the passion of a lifelong activist, Joel Berg has his eye on the growing number of people who are forced to wait on lines at food pantries across the nation-the modern breadline. All You Can Eat reveals that hunger is a problem as American as apple pie, and shows what it is like when your income is not enough to cover rising housing and living costs and put food on the table. Berg takes to task politicians who remain inactive; the media, which ignores hunger except during holidays and hurricanes; and the food industry, which makes fattening, artery-clogging fast food more accessible to the nation’s poor than healthy fare. He even chides organic food gurus such as Michael Pollan and Alice Waters for saying that the recent increase in food costs is a positive development, an assertion Berg deems to be class biased. He challenges the new President make hunger eradication a top priority – and offers him a simple and affordable plan to end it for good. A spirited call to action, All You Can Eat shows how practical solutions for hungry Americans will ultimately benefit America’s economy and all of its citizens.
Eating Animals (2009)
Like many young Americans, Jonathan Safran Foer spent much of his teenage and college years oscillating between enthusiastic carnivore and occasional vegetarian. As he became a husband, and then a father, the moral dimensions of eating became increasingly important to him. Faced with the prospect of being unable to explain why we eat some animals and not others, Foer set out to explore the origins of many eating traditions and the fictions involved with creating them. Traveling to the darkest corners of our dining habits, Foer raises the unspoken question behind every fish we eat, every chicken we fry, and every burger we grill. Part memoir and part investigative report, Eating Animals is a book that, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, places Jonathan Safran Foer “at the table with our greatest philosophers.”
Terra Madre (2010)
Large-scale industrial agriculture has run rampant and penetrated every corner of the world. The price of food is fixed by the rules of the market, which have neither concern for quality nor respect for producers. People have been forced into standardized, unnatural diets, and aggressive, chemical-based agriculture is ravaging ecosystems from the Great Plains to the Kalahari. Food has been stripped of its meaning, reduced to a mere commodity, and its mass production is contributing to injustice all over the world. In Terra Madre, Petrini shows us a solution in the thousands of newly formed local alliances between food producers and food consumers. And he proposes expanding these alliances—connecting regional food communities around the world to promote good, clean, and fair food. The end goal is a world in which communities are entitled to food sovereignty—allowed to choose not only what they want to grow and eat, but also how they produce and distribute it.
The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society (2009)
This book explores the idea that table activities–the mealtime rituals of food preparation, serving, and dining–lay the foundation for a proper education on the value of civility, the importance of the common good, and what it means to be a good citizen. The arts of conversation and diplomatic speech are learned and practiced at tables, and a political history of food practices recasts thoughtfulness and generosity as virtues that enhance civil society and democracy. In our industrialized and profit-centered culture, however, foodwork is devalued and civility is eroding.
Diet of a Hot Planet (2010)
A crucial piece of the conversation about climate change, Diet for a Hot Planet makes the disturbing connection between food production and global warming. Beyond what we already know about “food miles” and eating locally, the global food system is a major contributor to climate change, producing as much as one-third of greenhouse gas emissions. How we farm, what we eat, and how our food gets to the table all have an impact. And our government and the food industry are willfully ignoring the issue rather than addressing it. In her controversial book Anna Lappé predicts that unless we radically shift the trends of what food we’re eating and how we’re producing it, food system-related greenhouse gas emissions will go up. She exposes the interests that will resist the change, and the spin food companies will generate to avoid system-wide reform. And she offers a vision of a future in which our food system does more good than harm, with six principles for a climate friendly diet as well as visits to farmers who are demonstrating the potential of sustainable farming.
Agricultural Urbanism (2010)
Awareness of the significant challenges our food supply system faces in the 21st century is growing rapidly. Agricultural Urbanism, rooted in a sustainable food systems approach and written by leaders in the planning and design fields, outlines a powerful strategy for understanding and taking action on the full-scope of sustainable food system opportunities in cities and how we can build them. The book takes sustainable food systems far beyond the community garden and the buying of local food, into strategies for supporting local food processing, wholesale and marketing, education and training programs, as well as celebrating and creating a culture around food, at the same time as ensuring access to healthy food for all. The concept of agricultural urbanism has been declared as the next big movement for New Urbanism in the 21st century as we all grapple with how to make our cities not only more sustainable, but also great places in which to live. This book outlines key strategies to create amazingly magnetic agriculture and food precincts that are unique and special community places where food can be celebrated year-round.
Food Matters (2009)
We are finally starting to acknowledge the threat carbon emissions pose to our ozone layer, but few people have focused on the extent to which our consumption of meat contributes to global warming. Think about it this way: In terms of energy consumption, serving a typical family-of-four steak dinner is the rough equivalent of driving around in an SUV for three hours while leaving all the lights on at home. Bittman offers a no-nonsense rundown on how government policy, big business marketing, and global economics influence what we choose to put on the table each evening. He demystifies buzzwords like “organic,” “sustainable,” and “local” and offers straightforward, budget-conscious advice that will help you make small changes that will shrink your carbon footprint — and your waistline.
The 100-Mile Diet (2007)
The remarkable, amusing and inspiring adventures of a Canadian couple who make a year-long attempt to eat foods grown and produced within a 100-mile radius of their apartment.When Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon learned that the average ingredient in a North American meal travels 1,500 miles from farm to plate, they decided to launch a simple experiment to reconnect with the people and places that produced what they ate. For one year, they would only consume food that came from within a 100-mile radius of their Vancouver apartment. The 100-Mile Diet was born.The couple’s discoveries sometimes shook their resolve. It would be a year without sugar, Cheerios, olive oil, rice, Pizza Pops, beer, and much, much more. Yet local eating has turned out to be a life lesson in pleasures that are always close at hand. They met the revolutionary farmers and modern-day hunter-gatherers who are changing the way we think about food. They got personal with issues ranging from global economics to biodiversity. They called on the wisdom of grandmothers, and immersed themselves in the seasons. They discovered a host of new flavours, from gooseberry wine to sunchokes to turnip sandwiches, foods that they never would have guessed were on their doorstep.