Food and Farming
Six Arguments for a Greener Diet: How a Plant-based Diet
Could Save Our Health and the Environment by Michael F. Jacobson
A one-time Ralph Nader protégé explores some of the main reasons humans should eat a lot more plants and a lot fewer animals. Jacobson also shows that since America is clearly not about to become a vegetarian nation, we can at least raise the animals we do eat in vastly healthier, more humane ways than is now the case. Among the reasons for adjusting our diets is the staggering amount of environmental damage caused by raising all the animals that we currently consume. To provide a clearer picture of that side of the problem, Jacobson and his Center for Science in the Public Interest provide an Eating Green Calculator that can calculate one meat-eating individual's weekly damages to the planet. Anyone not already familiar with the environmental devastation caused by meat-based diets really needs to have a look at that and some of the other CSPI resources launched in association with this book.
Jacobson was interviewed on NPR's The Diane Rehm Show.
Eating Green ... published July 30, 2006 by Center for Science in the Public Interest
The End of Food: How the Food Industry is Destroying Our Food Supply -- And What We Can Do About It by Thomas F. Pawlick
Big Agriculture has bred many of the nutrients out of the "food" we're obliged to buy from them, says a veteran Canadian science and agriculture writer. Pawlick cites Agriculture Canada analyses showing that many fruits' and vegetables' vitamin and mineral contents have fallen by 50 percent or more from levels recorded a half-century ago -- a result of breeding tougher, easier-to-ship produce, rather than tastier, more nutritious fare. Mercifully, though, the author doesn't stop at simply bemoaning capitalism's Doomsday perversions of our food supply. Instead, he explains lots of practical ways in which ordinary citizens -- even those of us who live in large cities -- can circumvent the industrial food complex in order to buy and eat regionally produced food. Pawlick concludes, "We need to take back control of our own food supply, our own meals, and our own humanity."
The End of Food ... published June 25th, 2006 by Barricades Books
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
A UC-Berkeley journalism prof traces the food chains of four meals: one of conventional American fare made with items common to ordinary grocery stores; another with ingredients from a Whole Foods; a third with the produce of a small, diversified farm; and one that the author hunted and gathered. Along the way, Pollan shows that corn is integral to much of the "food" foisted on the world by industrial agriculture:
Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia. ... The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically come from Holsteins that spend their working lives tethered to machines, eating corn.
Terry Gross interviewed Pollan Tuesday on NPR's Fresh Air.
*Also available, unabridged, on Audio CD
The Omnivore's Dilemma ... published April 11, 2006 by Penguin Press
Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew by Samuel Fromartz
The American organic food industry has moved far beyond some of its counter-cultural roots and is now an $11 billion per year proposition, observes a veteran business journalist. Fromartz looks at some of the science proving major benefits (especially for children) of eating organic foods, and he traces the century-old history of the movement, its diversity, some of its methods, and its corporatization. Says he,
[A]fter deriding organic food as the "lunatic fringe" and "the muck and mystery school" "incapable of feeding the world," the mainstream food industry woke up and saw a growth market expanding at 20 percent a year in a business that at best ekes out 2-3 percent gains. That is why the largest dairy company in the nation, $10.5-billion Dean Foods, bought Horizon and Silk, the two biggest organic brands. Organic food thus was embraced by the very food system it was supposed to replace. This identity crisis -- and the meaning of organic foods as an "alternative" -- has produced many of the conflicts today.
Organic, Inc. ... published April 10, 2006 by Harcourt
Harvest for Hope by Jane Goodall
Famed for her fieldwork with chimpanzees, Jane Goodall now travels 300 days a year, speaking and writing on behalf of a variety of worthy causes that tend to relate in one way or another to the chimps she studies. While that might seem to put a book about human agriculture and eating habits beyond her reach, it doesn't. Goodall quickly and effectively shows the connections, then gets on with her main business.
And that's to urge her readers to adopt vastly healthier diets and to reject industrial agriculture while supporting instead local family farms. She shows how corporate farming produces food that's toxic both physically and -- for those of us who have better options -- morally. Those of us who can afford to make ethical decisions about what we buy and eat need to do so, and in effect cast our vote for a saner planet.
Goodall was featured a few weeks before Thanksgiving in an especially charming and well produced closing segment for NPR's On Point. It's available on the bottom half of this page -- I recommend it.
*Also available, in abridgement, on Audio CD
Harvest for Hope ... first published November 1, 2005 by Warner Books
Hungry Planet: What the World Eats by Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio
Award-winning photojournalist Peter Menzel and editor Faith D'Aluisio (who also teamed up for 1994's highly acclaimed Material World, "a visual portrait of life in 30 nations") serve up a gorgeous, thought-provoking coffee table or guestroom book. D'Aluisio's introduction explains their enterprise succinctly:
Peter Menzel and I invited ourselves to dinner with 30 families in 24 countries to explore humankind's oldest social activity: eating. Anyone who remembers grocery shopping 20 years ago knows that the U.S. diet has changed rapidly, but fewer people realize that this transformation is worldwide. Some dietary changes are due to globalization, as largescale capitalism reaches new places. Others are due to rising affluence, as people in formerly impoverished places gain the means to vary their diet -- first eating more meat and fish, then pizza and burgers. And some changes are due to the tides of migration, as travelers, immigrants, and refugees bring their own foods to new lands and acquire new tastes in return. To learn more we watched typical families the world over as they farmed, shopped, cooked, and ate. At the end of each visit, we created a portrait of the family surrounded by a week's worth of their groceries. The sum, we hope, is a culinary atlas of the planet at a time of extraordinary change.
Hungry Planet ... published October 1, 2005 by Ten Speed Press
Farm Aid: A Song for America edited by Holly George-Warren
Celebrating Farm Aid's 20th anniversary, this volume provides a fine overview -- with a pleasing balance of text and photos -- of where that great American tradition's been and where it may be going. Also included are some excellent essays dealing with broader agricultural issues. While the uninitiated might see "Farm Aid" and think "country music," that's basically incorrect. Most Farm Aid artists have in fact been mainstream pop of a relatively high quality: performers such as Neil Young, John Mellencamp, and Dave Matthews. That being the case, the Farm Aid phenomenon can provide something of a bridge between overwhelmingly urban liberal America and its lately very red rural counterpart. Having been a rural liberal for 40 years, I'd respectfully suggest to my parochially urban friends that if they made better efforts to understand and address agricultural concerns, "our" candidates might someday be something other than cannon fodder in the South and West. From out here in Middle America, such efforts have not always been apparent of late -- with predictable electoral results.
Farm Aid ... published August 25, 2005 by Rodale Books
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