The Industrial Diet

The Industrial Diet
Author: Anthony Winson
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2014
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1479862797

- "Provides all the evidence anyone needs to understand the problems with our current food system." - Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University - "A hugely informative book, stocked full of careful analysis." - Amy Best, Associate Professor of Sociology, George Mason University

The Industrial Diet

The Industrial Diet
Author: Anthony Winson
Publisher: UBC Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2013-05-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0774825537

The Industrial Diet chronicles the long-term transformation of food from a natural resource into an edible commodity that far too often fails to nourish us. Anthony Winson reveals how a combination of technological changes, population growth, and political and economic factors helped constitute and transform mass dietary regimes from the nineteenth century to the present day, and he offers new evidence linking broad-based dietary changes with negative health effects. With its focus on the degradation of food and the emergent struggle for healthful eating, this book encourages us to reflect on the state of our food environments and to create realistic and innovative strategies that can lead to a healthier future.

Formerly Known As Food

Formerly Known As Food
Author: Kristin Lawless
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2018-06-19
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1466890568

Sustainable Literature Commitee's2018 Green Prize Winner •One of Bustle's "17 Best Nonfiction Books Coming Out In June 2018" • One of The Revelator's "16 New Environmental Books for June" • One of Equinox's "5 Books High Performers Should Read in June" • One of Foodtank's "18 Books Making a Splash This Summer" •One of CivilEats' "22 Noteworthy Food and Farming Books for Summer Reading—and Beyond" From the voice of a new generation of food activists, a passionate and deeply-researched call for a new food movement. If you think buying organic from Whole Foods is protecting you, you're wrong. Our food—even what we're told is good for us—has changed for the worse in the past 100 years, its nutritional content deteriorating due to industrial farming and its composition altered due to the addition of thousands of chemicals from pesticides to packaging. We simply no longer know what we’re eating. In Formerly Known as Food, Kristin Lawless argues that, because of the degradation of our diet, our bodies are literally changing from the inside out. The billion-dollar food industry is reshaping our food preferences, altering our brains, changing the composition of our microbiota, and even affecting the expression of our genes. Lawless chronicles how this is happening and what it means for our bodies, health, and survival. An independent journalist and nutrition expert, Lawless is emerging as the voice of a new generation of food thinkers. After years of "eat this, not that" advice from doctors, journalists, and food faddists, she offers something completely different. Lawless presents a comprehensive explanation of the problem—going beyond nutrition to issues of food choice, class, race, and gender—and provides a sound and simple philosophy of eating, which she calls the "Whole Egg Theory." Destined to set the debate over food politics for the next decade, Formerly Known as Food speaks to a new generation looking for a different conversation about the food on our plates. Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough and This Changes Everything:"In this revelatory survey of the dangers of the industrial food system, Lawless offers crucial tools for navigating it safely. The best ones have nothing to do with shopping advice: she asks us to think holistically about food, why it can't be separated from other struggles for justice, and what it means to demand transformative change." Mark Bittman, author of How to Cook Everything: "A stirring call to action. Lawless has done a thorough job of describing how so much of what we eat doesn't qualify as 'food'" Laurie David, Academy Award winning producer of An Inconvenient Truth and Fed Up: “You better read this book before you put another bite of food in your or your kids' mouths!” Mary Esther Malloy, MA, Mindful Birth NY: "Groundbreaking... will get you thinking differently about how you nourish yourself and your family."

Food Politics

Food Politics
Author: Marion Nestle
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 537
Release: 2013-05-14
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 0520955064

We all witness, in advertising and on supermarket shelves, the fierce competition for our food dollars. In this engrossing exposé, Marion Nestle goes behind the scenes to reveal how the competition really works and how it affects our health. The abundance of food in the United States--enough calories to meet the needs of every man, woman, and child twice over--has a downside. Our over-efficient food industry must do everything possible to persuade people to eat more--more food, more often, and in larger portions--no matter what it does to waistlines or well-being. Like manufacturing cigarettes or building weapons, making food is big business. Food companies in 2000 generated nearly $900 billion in sales. They have stakeholders to please, shareholders to satisfy, and government regulations to deal with. It is nevertheless shocking to learn precisely how food companies lobby officials, co-opt experts, and expand sales by marketing to children, members of minority groups, and people in developing countries. We learn that the food industry plays politics as well as or better than other industries, not least because so much of its activity takes place outside the public view. Editor of the 1988 Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health, Nestle is uniquely qualified to lead us through the maze of food industry interests and influences. She vividly illustrates food politics in action: watered-down government dietary advice, schools pushing soft drinks, diet supplements promoted as if they were First Amendment rights. When it comes to the mass production and consumption of food, strategic decisions are driven by economics--not science, not common sense, and certainly not health. No wonder most of us are thoroughly confused about what to eat to stay healthy. An accessible and balanced account, Food Politics will forever change the way we respond to food industry marketing practices. By explaining how much the food industry influences government nutrition policies and how cleverly it links its interests to those of nutrition experts, this path-breaking book helps us understand more clearly than ever before what we eat and why.

Inventing Baby Food

Inventing Baby Food
Author: Amy Bentley
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2014-09-19
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 0520283457

Food consumption is a significant and complex social activity—and what a society chooses to feed its children reveals much about its tastes and ideas regarding health. In this groundbreaking historical work, Amy Bentley explores how the invention of commercial baby food shaped American notions of infancy and influenced the evolution of parental and pediatric care. Until the late nineteenth century, infants were almost exclusively fed breast milk. But over the course of a few short decades, Americans began feeding their babies formula and solid foods, frequently as early as a few weeks after birth. By the 1950s, commercial baby food had become emblematic of all things modern in postwar America. Little jars of baby food were thought to resolve a multitude of problems in the domestic sphere: they reduced parental anxieties about nutrition and health; they made caretakers feel empowered; and they offered women entering the workforce an irresistible convenience. But these baby food products laden with sugar, salt, and starch also became a gateway to the industrialized diet that blossomed during this period. Today, baby food continues to be shaped by medical, commercial, and parenting trends. Baby food producers now contend with health and nutrition problems as well as the rise of alternative food movements. All of this matters because, as the author suggests, it’s during infancy that American palates become acclimated to tastes and textures, including those of highly processed, minimally nutritious, and calorie-dense industrial food products.

Diet for a Large Planet

Diet for a Large Planet
Author: Chris Otter
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2023-06-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226826538

A history of the unsustainable modern diet—heavy in meat, wheat, and sugar—that requires more land and resources than the planet is able to support. We are facing a world food crisis of unparalleled proportions. Our reliance on unsustainable dietary choices and agricultural systems is causing problems both for human health and the health of our planet. Solutions from lab-grown food to vegan diets to strictly local food consumption are often discussed, but a central question remains: how did we get to this point? In Diet for a Large Planet, Chris Otter goes back to the late eighteenth century in Britain, where the diet heavy in meat, wheat, and sugar was developing. As Britain underwent steady growth, urbanization, industrialization, and economic expansion, the nation altered its food choices, shifting away from locally produced plant-based nutrition. This new diet, rich in animal proteins and refined carbohydrates, made people taller and stronger, but it led to new types of health problems. Its production also relied on far greater acreage than Britain itself, forcing the nation to become more dependent on global resources. Otter shows how this issue expands beyond Britain, looking at the global effects of large agro-food systems that require more resources than our planet can sustain. This comprehensive history helps us understand how the British played a significant role in making red meat, white bread, and sugar the diet of choice—linked to wealth, luxury, and power—and shows how dietary choices connect to the pressing issues of climate change and food supply.

Nutrition for a Better Life

Nutrition for a Better Life
Author: Peter Brabeck-Letmathe
Publisher: Campus Verlag
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2016-11-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3593434377

In Nutrition for a Better Life, one of the food industry's leading experts takes a factual look into the past and future of food and nutrition. Former Nestlé CEO Peter Brabeck-Letmathe shows that while in the past forty years convenience was the selling point for many industrially produced foods, consumers have now come to demand specifically healthy products. Going forward, it is health that will drive innovation in the industry. Using cutting-edge technology and scientifically based nutrition standards, the food industry will play a decisive role in improving the wellbeing of entire population groups, offering effective and cost-saving personalized diets that will both prevent and administer to the acute and chronic diseases of the twenty-first century.

Diet and the Disease of Civilization

Diet and the Disease of Civilization
Author: Adrienne Rose Bitar
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2018-01-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0813589665

Diet books contribute to a $60-billion industry as they speak to the 45 million Americans who diet every year. Yet these books don’t just tell readers what to eat: they offer complete philosophies about who Americans are and how we should live. Diet and the Disease of Civilization interrupts the predictable debate about eating right to ask a hard question: what if it’s not calories—but concepts—that should be counted? Cultural critic Adrienne Rose Bitar reveals how four popular diets retell the “Fall of Man” as the narrative backbone for our national consciousness. Intensifying the moral panic of the obesity epidemic, they depict civilization itself as a disease and offer diet as the one true cure. Bitar reads each diet—the Paleo Diet, the Garden of Eden Diet, the Pacific Island Diet, the detoxification or detox diet—as both myth and manual, a story with side effects shaping social movements, driving industry, and constructing fundamental ideas about sickness and health. Diet and the Disease of Civilization unearths the ways in which diet books are actually utopian manifestos not just for better bodies, but also for a healthier society and a more perfect world.

Politically Incorrect Nutrition

Politically Incorrect Nutrition
Author: Michael Barbee
Publisher: Square One Publishers, Inc.
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2012-05-22
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0757053181

Did you know that some noncaloric artificial sweeteners can actually make you fat—or even kill you? Did you know that the overconsumption of certain soy products can upset your hormonal balance and lead to hypothyroidism? Most people didn’t, until now. Politically Incorrect Nutrition exposes many current and widely held beliefs foisted on both consumers and health-care practitioners by well-oiled, agenda-driven food industry propaganda. It analyzes popular claims and reveals what, in fact, is healthy—and what is decidedly unhealthy—by exploring the most current and objective scientific data regarding good nutrition. If you want to provide the best possible food for yourself and your family, or if you simply want to learn the truth behind the many food myths that are presented to us day after day, Politically Incorrect Nutrition is must reading.

In Defence of Food

In Defence of Food
Author: Michael Pollan
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2008-01-31
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0141908513

'A must-read ... satisfying, rich ... loaded with flavour' Sunday Telegraph This book is a celebration of food. By food, Michael Pollan means real, proper, simple food - not the kind that comes in a packet, or has lists of unpronounceable ingredients, or that makes nutritional claims about how healthy it is. More like the kind of food your great-grandmother would recognize. In Defence of Food is a simple invitation to junk the science, ditch the diet and instead rediscover the joys of eating well. By following a few pieces of advice (Eat at a table - a desk doesn't count. Don't buy food where you'd buy your petrol!), you will enrich your life and your palate, and enlarge your sense of what it means to be healthy and happy. It's time to fall in love with food again. For the past twenty years, Michael Pollan has been writing about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: food, agriculture, gardens, drugs, and architecture. His most recent book, about the ethics and ecology of eating, is The Omnivore's Dilemma, named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post. He is also the author of The Botany of Desire, A Place of My Own and Second Nature.