Here is a list of recent food-related books that we’ve either digested, are currently snacking on, or intend to read very soon. (We’re also cooking up a list of movies about food politics.) Many of the cover images and titles are linked to our Powells.com bookshelf, where you can support an independent bookseller and your favorite conscious-eating blog — we get a wee percentage of books you buy through these links, which will go to feed our high-fructose corn syrup addiction. Where applicable, we’ve also linked to reviews we’ve done and to websites where you can read an excerpt of the book. This is a list in progress — we welcome suggestions for additions. You know what else we like? Review copies!
Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California
Julie Guthman | University of California Press, 2004
In this first comprehensive study of organic farming in California, Julie Guthman casts doubt on the current wisdom about organic food and agriculture, at least as it has evolved in the Golden State. Refuting popular portrayals of organic agriculture as a small-scale family farm endeavor in opposition to "industrial" agriculture, she explains how organic farming has replicated what it set out to oppose.
Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back
Michelle Simon | Nation Books 2006
Simon, a health policy expert and law professor, skewers the food industry for undermining the health of Americans with "nutrient deficient factory made pseudofoods." In lawyerly fashion, she explains the ABCs of the business imperative of "Big Food" (Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods and McDonald’s, among many others): make short-term profit without regard to the product’s nutritional value or societal effects.
Chew on This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food
Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson | Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006
Did you know that the biggest toy company in the world is McDonald’s? Fast Food Nation author Schlosser and his cowriter Charles Wilson share with kids the truth about what lurks between those sesame seed buns, what a chicken ‘nugget’ really is, and how the fast food industry has been feeding off children for generations.
Diet for a Dead Planet: How the Food Industry is Killing Us
Christopher Cook | New Press 2004
Going beyond fast food and GMOs to explain why our entire food system is in crisis, Cook tells how corporate control of farms and supermarkets, unsustainable drives to increase agribusiness profits, misplaced subsidies for exports, and anemic regulation have all combined to produce a grim harvest. Cook argues cogently for a whole new way of looking at what we eat — one that places healthy, sustainably produced food at the top of the menu for political change.
The Ethical Gourmet: How to Enjoy Great Food That Is Humanely Raised, Sustainable, Nonendangered, and That Replenishes the Earth
Jay Weinstein | Broadway Books, 2006
Chef and environmentalist Jay Weinstein writes for those who care about both the well-being of the world and flavorful food, covering “when organics really matter, where to source humanely-raised meats and other ethically produced foods, and how to make choices with a clean conscience when dining out.” Plus recipes.
Derrick Schneider over at An Obsession With Food has a thoughtful review.
Fields of Plenty: A farmer’s journey in search of real food and the people who grow it
Michael Ableman | Chronicle Books, 2005
The memoir of farmer, writer, and photographer Michael Ableman about traveling with his son from his own farm in British Columbia across the United States in search of innovative and passionate farmers who are making a difference in what we eat and how we experience food.
Fields That Dream: A Journey to the Roots of Our Food
Jenny Kurzweil | Fulcrum, 2005
Portraits of refugees, immigrants, former chefs, insurance brokers, and union organizers who are now small-scale sustainable farmers. Each chapter combines the story of a farmer who sells at a successful farmers market with a social/cultural history of agriculture in the United States.
Four Seasons in Five Senses: Things Worth Savoring
David Mas Masumoto | W.W. Norton, 2003
A California fruit farmer pays homage to the life of the senses: smell that knows when a peach is ready to be picked; sight that observes the health of a season’s crop; touch that measures the weight of a fruit; hearing that recognizes each voice that calls out across the fields; and taste that savors the refreshing tang of a fruit at that perfect moment of ripeness.
Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection
Jessica Prentice | Chelsea Green Publishing, 2006
Chef and passionate food activist Jessica Prentice champions locally grown, humanely raised, nutrient-rich foods and traditional cooking methods. She decries our modern food culture and the suffering—physical, emotional, cultural, communal, and spiritual—born of a disconnect from our food sources. Includes recipes for foods following the 13 lunar cycles of an agrarian year.
Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen
Anna Lappé and Bryant Terry | Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2006
A chef and the activist daughter of Diet for a Small Planet author have combined original recipes and practical tools to create a healthy organic kitchen with information about the revolution in food and farming.
Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
Bill Buford | Random House, 2006
The subtitle says it all. A New Yorker contributor, Buford is a very entertaining writer.
Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn
Catherine Friend | Marlowe & Company 2006
An urban bookworm agrees to her girlfriend’s decision to fulfill her lifelong dream of owning a farm. A crash course in both living off and with the land ensues.
Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer’s Guide to Farm Friendly Food
Joel Salatin | Polyface Publishing, 2005
Written by the libertarian Christian farmer behind Polyface Farm, the paragon of sustainability featured in Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” this book hopes to empower food buyers to pursue positive alternatives to the industrialized food system, to educate food buyers about production methods, and to create a food system that enhances nature’s ecology for future generations.
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair | 1906
A journalist intended to expose the squalid labor practices underpinning the turn-of-the-century meat-processing industry, and ended up igniting a furor over food safety that resulted in the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug Acts of 1906 and the founding of the Food and Drug Administration.
Review by the Ethicurean’s Man of La Muncha
Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food
Warren Belasco | University of California Press 2006
A sweeping look at humanity’s deep-rooted anxiety about the future of food. People have expressed their worries about the future of the food supply in myriad ways, and here Belasco explores a fascinating array of material ranging over 200 years. After placing food issues in historical context, he provides a framework for understanding the future of food today — when new prophets warn us against complacency at the same time that new technologies offer promising solutions.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan | Penguin Press 2006
If you’re not sure where to start with this reading list, start here. Pollan traces the path from earth to plate taken by four meals — from McDonald’s, Whole Foods, a Virginia farm, and one that he killed, foraged, and grew himself. Along the way to his main destinations — the feedlot where "his" steer is being fattened, the vast facility where organic baby lettuces are being washed and bagged, a pasture in which chickens joyfully root through cow manure, or the forest where he is helping to disembowel a wild boar — he delivers fascinating mini-lectures on agricultural history, plant biology, food chemistry, nutrition, and the animal-rights debate.
Interview/feature with Pollan.
The Organic Cook’s Bible
Jeff Cox | Wiley, 2006
Following a discussion of what constitutes organic food, Cox offers a comprehensive A-Z guide to ingredients both humdrum and exotic; for each entry, he gives a brief history of the item, its organic cultivation, nutrition, types, seasonality, selection hints, preparation, and uses. Each citation has a recipe or two featuring the item as an ingredients.
Organic Housekeeping
Ellen Sandbeck | Simon & Schuster, 2006
The subtitle says it all: “In Which the Non-Toxic Avenger Shows You How to Improve Your Health and That of Your Family, While You Save Time, Money, and, Perhaps, Your Sanity.”
Organic, Inc
Samuel Fromartz | Harcourt, 2006
Chronicling the growth of a cultural movement from its genesis as an ideal vision of farming, food and health to a multibillion-dollar industry. A tale of what happens when ideals meet the marketplace.
Review by the Ethicurean’s Butter Bitch
Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally
Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon | Harmony (Random House), 2007
The 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.
Real Food: What to Eat and Why
Nina Planck | Bloomsbury, 2006
Farm-girl-turned-farmers-market-impresario Nina Planck explains why traditional foods such as butter are healthy and industrial foods are not. She tells how butter, lard, beef, cheese, eggs, and other foods got their bad rap — and why it’s a bad rap.
Review by the Man of La Muncha
The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation
David Kamp | Broadway Books, 2006
When did "macaroni" become "pasta"? Kamp chronicles America’s rapid culinary transformation from the overcooked vegetables and scary gelatin salads of yore to our current heyday of free-range chickens, extra-virgin olive oil, Iron Chef, Whole Foods, Starbucks, and that breed of human known as the "foodie."
The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter
Peter Singer and Jim Mason | Rodale Books 2006
The famously uncompromising ethicist Peter Singer explores the eating habits of three different American families: vegans, "conscientious omnivores" and a family eating the "standard American diet." The two writers then carefully consider the elements of each diet and the production chain that brought it to the table are in light of environmental impact, fair trade, the organic movement, the grow-local movement, genetically modified foods, animal rights, and the shenanigans of agribusiness.
What to Eat: An Aisle-by-Aisle Guide to Savvy Food Choices and Good Eating
Marion Nestle | North Point Press, 2006
Nutritionist Marion Nestle takes you on a guided tour of the supermarket in order to help readers make sensible food choices. In a low-key, nonpreachy style, she tells you just what you need to know about fresh and frozen, wild and farm-raised, organic and “natural,” omega-3 and trans fats, then proceeds to decode food labels, nutrition and health claims, and portion sizes.
Food, Farming, & Food Politics events calendar
Humor:
June 26th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
Hello,
It would be great to see Ethicurean presence on LibraryThing, currently there’s very little food(book) discussion going on in the forums, even though The Omnivores Dilemma is relatively high in popularity. I feel as though the book people would stir up some interesting discussion, and that ethicurean presence would stir up more interest in the issues at hand.
Thanks,
CE
June 28th, 2007 at 10:09 am
Hi Cris: Never heard of Library Thing, but we’ll check it out. Thanks!
Sheesh, we really need to update this booklist, too.