Currently browsing posts about: Books

Julian Baggini.  How the World Eats: A Global Food Philosophy. Granta, 2024.  443 pages.

I did a blurb for this one:

How the World Eats is an enormously wide overview of how people throughout the entire world–from hunter-gatherers to NASA astronauts–view, exist within, manage, and try to improve their food systems.  Baggini’s philosophy makes sense.  We need sustainable food systems to feed the world.

When I say “enormously wide,” I’m not kidding.  Baggini has interviewed an amazing number of people, including me.  I do not remember our interview (I don’t keep track of interviews), but he quotes me extensively—and my book Food Politics—especially in the chapter titled “The Big Business of Food.”

The book is long, not least because Baggini lets his interviews speak for themselves, regardless of their opinions on controversial food issues.  He does not use the book to argue with the people he interviewed.  If you want to know what everyone, everywhere thinks about food, from every side of an issue, this is a good starting place.

Eventually, Bagggini comes out in favor of food systems that are, in his words, “holistic, circular, pluralistic, foodcentric, resourceful, compassionate, and equitable.”

If we were to adopt the principles of Holism, Circularity, Pluralism, Foodcentrism, Resourcefulness, Compassion, and Equitability, many of the desiderata we have for the food world would come along for the ride. Everyone is in favour of sustainability, and that is what we would get if we followed these seven principles.  Similarly, a circular, plural and resourceful food system is also an efficient ne.  When the main things people want flow naturally from a set of principles, that is a good sign that those principles are the right ones.  p. 361

James Merchant and Robert Martin, eds. Public Health Impacts of Industrial Farm Animal Production.  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024.

I served on the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production with both authors about 15 years ago and was happy to do a blurb for their book.

This hard-hitting book defies meat industry pressure and obfuscation to document the devastating effects of its current production methods on the quality of air and water and on human health.  It doesn’t have to be this way.  Here’s a roadmap for a healthier and environmentally sustainable meat production system.

The book begins with an account of meat industry interference with the work of the Pew Commission and researchers investigating the health and polluting effects of CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations).

Our experience, and that of several of the authors of the 12 chapters in this book, have encountered considerable interference with their academic freedom as exerted directly by industrial agriculture or its pressure on academic administrators. Ensuring academic freedom, unbiased funding and unbiased research is critical to a sustainable environment and to protect the public’s health…. The pressure included industry harassment and intimidation of community residents, industry intrusion seeking to identify study subjects and research records, pressure applied to University administrators, and intimidation and litigation threats.

The multi-authored chapters document the extensive damage to health, the environment, and social justice caused by CAFOs, and recommend ways to deal with it.

Enforcing existing laws about air, water, soil, odor pollution, and animal welfare would be a good starting point.

This book was sent to me by its publisher (Penguin) and was it ever fun to read.  Twilley’s subtitle says it all.  She connects it to everything.

I particularly enjoyed two things in this book: its broad scope, from home ice boxes to economic development in Rwanda, and her personal experiences visiting icy cold packing plants, storage facilities, trucks, and seed vaults on the Faroe Islands.

Here is Twilley on bananas, of all things:

Contrary to popular belief, bananas are the ultimate refrigerated fruit.  In order to be a global commodity rather than an exotic luxury, the banana depends on a seamless network of thermal control.  This comes as something of a shock to most people.  Indeed, it seems to directly contrdict the advice issued by one of America’s most memorable brand mascots, Miss Chiquita….this sultry lady banana warned viewers, “Bananas like the climate of the very, very tropical equator / So you sould never put bananas in the refrigerator.”   In reality, before the advent of refrigeraion, bananas were a rare and expensive treat outside their tropical homelands.

Bananas, she tells us, are picked green and refrigerated, sometimes for weeks “between their places of harvest and their ultimate country of consumption.”

Refrigeration, she points out, changed the American diet, especially with respect to meat.

The ripple effect of this transformation shapes the geography and economics of American meat to this day.  Urban stockyard workers had been unionized since the 1930s; employees of the new rural processing plants were not: they were and are paid much less.  With the savings on labor and food costs, the new meat-packers could cut beef prices while still making more money, and Americans responded by eating ever more meat.

The book focuses on the Big Picture:

In short, our food system is frostbitten: it has been injured by its exposure to cold.  Part of the reason for that is that refrigeration was implemented, for the most part, in order to optimize markets rather than human and environmental health.

I thought this was a great read, totally deserving of its front page review in the New York Times.

But I wish she had cited Hi’ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart’s Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Duke University Press, 2022)   Hi’ilei’s terrific book covers some of the same themes with respect to Hawai’i.  She got her doctorate in my NYU department and is now teaching at Yale.  We are proud of her!

And one tiny quibble.  Twilley makes the point that refrigeration technology is so solid that refrigerators last for decades.  Well, they used to.  Today, not so much.  Those big expensive machines are not expected to last more than a few years, not because of the refrigeration mechanisms but because of the electronics.  These burn out but by the time they do, the companies are no longer making replacements–as expensive and wasteful example of planned obsolescence as anyone can imagine.  I was sorry she didn’t mention this.

This brand new book—all 498 pages of it—is open access.

As the publisher explains,

• This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access
• Analyzes the connections between agriculture and resource use, commodity trade, food businesses, and retail markets
• Provides diagrams and data visualizations to explain, predict, and assess changes in the food system
• Features rich visualizations and primary source information for updated charts from US and international sources

The authors have gone to a lot of trouble to make basic economic concepts clear.  For example,

We use the term monopoly to describe a market with just one seller and the less common term monopsony when there is just one buyer. The two are symmetrical, so both kinds of market power are sometimes called monopoly power. But distinguishing between monopoly and monopsony is useful because food businesses can potentially exercise both at the same time. For example, a large dairy processor and distributor might become a monopsonist in buying raw milk from farmers and a monopolist in selling dairy products to consumers. Their potential market power is ‘two-sided’, similar to online platforms for food delivery that could potentially become the only intermediary between restaurants and customers.

They also have lots of ifnteresting points to make.

The persistence of family farming is among the most surprising facts about the economics of food. In the U.S. and elsewhere most farms do not sell directly to consumers but operate behind the scenes, selling their produce in bulk to specialists for transport and distribution, often for use as ingredients in packaged and processed foods. Unlike farms, the food companies with whom consumers usually interact are typically owned by investors and run by hired managers. They buy ingredients from various sources, often combining produce from many different farms. Consumers everywhere in the world often seek out opportunities to buy directly from individual farmers, but that is special in part because it is relatively rare.

Take advantage of this offer!

• Download book PDF
• Download book EPU

Welcome to the online Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies, edited by Darra Goldstein.

The articles submitted to this project so far are here.

I wrote one for it: Nestle M.  Food Politics and Policy.

I looks to me as though these articles are Open Access, meaning you can read them for free.

Enjoy!

Jennifer Grayson.  A Call to Farms: Reconnecting to Nature, Food, and Community in a Modern World.  Countryman Press, 2024.

What a great title! I did a blurb for Jennifer Grayson’s previous book, Unlatched: The Evolution of Breastfeeding and the Making of a Controversy, and was happy to have the chance to blurb this one too, not least because “A Call to Farms” is such a great title.  Grayson, as it happens, is one terrific writer.   

Here’s the new blurb:

In this deeply inspiring book, Jennifer Grayson examines the motives, practices, problems, and successes of a diverse collection of young small-scale farmers growing food sustainably and achieving enormous satisfaction and joy in the process. The farmers described in A Call to Farms, provide abundant reasons for hope in the future of food healthier for people and the planet as well as for its producers.  If you are looking for hope, here it is.

And here is a short excerpt capturing its essence:

A week into my first farm job, I realized it was the most joyful and fulfilling work I had ever experienced.  After two months of being outside all day, nearly every day, I felt the best—both physically and mentally—that I ever had in my life.  But the real transformation occurred as I began to meet and learn bout the new and driven farmers, graziers, and food activists emerging all over the country.  They hadn’t grown up in farming families; they came from backgrounds vastly underrepresented in agriculture; and many of them were far younger than I was, not to mention decades younger than the average American farmer.  I was awestruck by their intention and ingenuity.  They hadn’t turned to this way of life as some back-to-the-land fantasy.  They had chosen sustainable agriculture as a tactile way to effect environmental activism and food justice; for cultural reclamation; to reconnect to nature, food, and community; to live aligned with their values; to do, in the words of one farmer you’ll meet in this book, “something that means something.”

As I said, inspiring.  Get out there and farm!

Jennifer E. Gaddis and Sarah A. Robert.  Transforming School Food Politics Around the World.  MIT Press, 2024 (322 pages)

This is an edited volume describing programs and policies to improve school food in the United Sttates, but also Japan, Canada, Peru, Finland, India, Brazil, and South Korea.

Every country does school food its own way.  Only three countries—India, Brazil, and South Korea—have universal school meals, although some U.S. states do too (one chapter explains how states managed it).

Overall, the chapters explain what school food advocates are doing and what works.

If you are interested in school food advocacy, this book is your Bible.

It is especially so because it is Open Access.  You don’t believe this?  Here is a link to a pdf of the entire book.

Even more, the authors wrote a guide to the book with chapter-by-chapter discussion questions, activities, and other resources useful for college classes and practitioner book clubs.  This too is Open Access: here is the link to the study guide.

Enjoy!  And use!

Chuck Schwerin.  Ghosts of Glencoe.  North Country Books, 2024.  472 pages.

I don’t usually recommend books here that are not about food politics.  This one, a rare exception, has only the most tenuous connection to the theme of this blog.

It is set in a fictional location much like the North Country School, a boarding school for teenagers near Lake Placid and the Adirondacks.  The school was one of the first to adopt an Edible Schoolyard project, still going strong.

I am making the exception because Chuck Schwerin is my next-door neighbor in Ithaca.  I had no idea he was writing a novel.  When he asked me to read the manuscript for a blurb, I didn’t know what to think.  What if I hated it?

Fortunately, I did not.  I could not put it down.  It is one fabulous adventure story.

Here’s my blurb:

Ghosts of Glencoe is a thrillingly plotted, utterly authentic coming-of-age story of what we can all learn from wilderness, at any age. I cared what happened to these characters, and couldn’t stop reading until its most satisfying conclusion.

I’m not a mountain person but I know plenty of people who are.

They would rather be climbing peaks than doing anything else, regardless of weather, rocky terrain, or mortal danger.

This book captures that sense, through the actions of teachers and students at the fictional Glencoe school, all of them human in their own unique ways.  You get to know these people well.   You care about what they do, the decisions they make, and the consequences of their decisions.

It’s a terrific read—just the thing for a summer vacation.

Enjoy!

Addition

There is an audio book.  Access at Kobo Books here.