Written by David Zinczenko, the editor-in-chief of “Men’s Health” magazine, “Eat This, Not That” is highly accessible and fun to read. The premise is simple: You don’t have to change your lifestyle to lose weight. Don’t eat less. Keep eating out. Fast food is OK. Just make some simple food swaps and you’ll shed pounds, be healthier, feel better, and ultimately be more successful.

An environmental lawyer for 20 years, including four spent with the USDA, Claire Hope Cummings reports regularly on agriculture and the environment; she has also farmed in California and in Vietnam. She chatted recently with the Ethicurean about her new book, “Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds.”

Somewhere along the line, the knowledge base surrounding food dwindled as more home cooks turned to processed and even pre-prepared food. What influenced this loss of basic understanding? How did we become so estranged from the natural environment and the food web that supports us? Ann Vileisis spent a great deal of time researching those questions, and in “Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get It Back” she offers a complicated weave of historical events that persuaded us to adopt “an unspoken covenant between shoppers and an increasingly powerful food industry.”

A review I wrote of “Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives,” a new UK food-politics book by architecture professor Carolyn Steel, appeared in the Financial Times’ weekend supplement yesterday.
There’s a lot in the last chapter of the book that bears discussing here, including vertical farms and how historically ideas of utopia have always included […]

Taras Grescoe says he wrote “Bottomfeeder” (Bloomsbury USA, May 2008) for a somewhat selfish reason: he wanted to taste the world’s great seafood dishes — like bouillabaisse in Marseilles, fish and chips in England, bluefin tuna sashimi in Tokyo — before they disappeared or were dramatically changed by our plundering of the oceans. Whatever his motivation, Grescoe has given us a fascinating book that I hope will inform many about the dire state of the oceans, expose the dreadful environmental consequences of badly managed aquaculture, and prompt us to make better seafood choices.

The radio program Living on Earth has been running excerpts from "Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape," a book by renowned nature writer Barry Lopez ("Crossing Open Ground," "Arctic Dreams," "Of Wolves and Men") that defines landscape terms such as pack ice, blind creek, and cascade. On a recent program, they featured a […]

The flaws of industrial agriculture and the current backlash against it came into sharp focus a couple of weeks ago, following the death of former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, well-known for his exhortations to farmers to "Get big or get out" and to plant from "fence row to fence row." Between the success […]

Michael Pollan came to Canada — almost.
The promotional tour for his new book "In Defense of Food" landed him an interview on CBC Radio’s The Current (listen to the interview here) this past Wednesday, January 9th. He wasn’t actually in Canada — he broadcast his bit from the CBC studios in New York while […]

There’s a full crop of reviews of “In Defense of Food,” and an interview with Pollan about it on NPR. Here are the raves and the contrarians, movie-marquee style: “A tough, witty, cogent rebuttal to the proposition that food can be reduced to its nutritional components without the loss of something essential.” — New York Times”Pollan isn’t just asking us to consider changing the way we eat. He’s asking us to join a movement that’s “renovating our food system in the name of health’” — L.A. Times”If you read one book about food this year,” this should be it —The Portland Mercury”Pollan lays bare with impassioned but clear-eyed intelligence the sinister machinations of the contemporary American food industry” — New York Post”[The food movement] couldn’t pray for a better mouthpiece” — Plenty”Page for page, it contains more intellectual and moral nutrition than practically any other book I’m aware of.”

“In Defense of Food” does more than merely stick up for the produce section: it mounts a damning attack on this diet, which in Pollan’s assessment is “a radical and at least in evolutionary terms, abrupt set of changes over the course of the last 150 years, not just to our foodstuffs but also to our food relationships, all the way from the soil to the meal.”… This is huge, evolutionarily speaking, writes Pollan: Of all the changes to our food system that go under the heading “the Western Diet,” the shift from a food chain with green plants at its base to one based on seeds may be the most far reaching of all…. “The food industry needs theories so it can better redesign specific processed foods; a new theory means a new line of products, allowing the industry to go on tweaking the Western diet instead of making any more radical change to its business model,” Pollan writes…. And while he for the most part acknowledges when he resorts to the familiar “good nutrient, bad nutrient” jargon, he could have emphasized more in the section on omega-3 fatty acids that, while the food industry is jumping on the bandwagon for this current It nutrient, whole foods like salmon that naturally contain it have far lower levels when fed unnatural diets from, you guessed it, grains…. He doesn’t mention that not only does Ames believe that deficiencies in micronutrient may be behind obesity — positing the very interesting hypothesis that “a body starved of critical nutrients will keep eating in the hope of obtaining them” — but like all good nutritionists, he is hard at work on identifying and developing artificial versions of those missing micronutrients.

Nearly fifty years after editing “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” the book that launched Julia Child, Judith Jones (now senior editor and vice-president at Alfred A. Knopf) has written her own memoir: “The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food.” Having grown up in a family that served only staid, simple, British-influenced meals, she developed a passion for food and cooking that led her to France (and back) and, eventually, to editing a large number of ground-breaking cookbooks.

The mass media’s coverage of food is a cacophony of quick fixes ("Eat a handful of goji berries and wipe out the effects of those two fast-food burgers you ate for lunch!") and hype ("Do cranberries cure cancer? Stay tuned for a shocking new report").
Heidi Swanson — creator of the 101 Cookbooks website — […]

Peter shares his recipe for “spring salad” aka egg-less chopped egg salad.

I apologize for not posting last week, but I’ve been quite busy lately. I’ve spent the better part of the last two weeks playing drums for a college production of the musical “Hair” and I also celebrated my birthday last week.
Noshette kindly took me out to an early dinner (I had a 7pm curtain call) […]

On May 10 Dairy Queen and I went to a lecture by Slow Food International founder Carlo Petrini, who’s on the road to promote the English-language release of his book “Slow Food Nation.” The book, which we have not yet read, is about the future of food, and what we must do to prevent […]