Weekend reading: Sam Kass’s The Last Supper

Sam Kass.  The Last Supper: How to Overcome the Future Food Crisis.  Crown, 2025. 246 pages.

Here’s my blurb:

Part memoir—his version of his chef-activist time in the Obama White House–and part rousing call to action on climate change, The Last Supper is Sam Kass’s impressively compelling manifesto for food system transformation.  Read it and get to work.

Kass argues that to transform food systems so they focus on health and sustainability, we need to change four pillars: culture, policy, business, and technology.

From the pillar on changing culture:

But government ignoring the will of the people to produce better food in better ways is not the reason our politics and our businesses are failing us.  While this tale is easy to digest, it overlooks a more uncomfortable truth: Voters and consumers, the very people these systems serve, are complicit in the problem.  At the root of this is our culture.

The reality is that most people don’t prioritize climate change or regenerative agriculture when making decisions about food and politicians.  Most don’t even consider it.,  Convenience, price, and taste reign supreme in consumer choices, and as a result the market responds to those demands rather than focusing on sustainability. [pp 51-52]

From the pillar on changing business:

Wall Street’s focus on quarterly earnings deeply embeds short-term thinking in publicly traded companies.  If investors don’t begin to steer money toward companies that are investing in better food, in food produced in more sustainable ways, and reducing the footprint of their operations, we are going to make only small, incremental progress.  I believe large-scale change will start to happen as investors in food and agricultural companies begin to realize how much risk these companies are holding because of climate change.  And none of that risk is priced into their stock prices. [p. 158]

You don’t have to agree with everything Kass says (he has some snippy comments on my opinions) to appreciate how good this book is.  It’s full of interesting observations and ideas about what needs to be done to create needed changes.  He calls it a roadmap for action.  It is and I wish we would all get to work on it.