The Fate of Food

The Fate of Food
Author: Amanda Little
Publisher: Harmony
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2019
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 080418903X

"In this fascinating look at the race to secure the global food supply, environmental journalist and professor Amanda Little tells the defining story of the sustainable food revolution as she weaves together stories from the world's most creative and controversial innovators on the front lines of food science, agriculture, and climate change"--

The Chain

The Chain
Author: Ted Genoways
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2014-10-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0062288776

A powerful and important work of investigative journalism that explores the runaway growth of the American meatpacking industry and its dangerous consequences “A worthy update to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and a chilling indicator of how little has changed since that 1906 muckraking classic.” — Mother Jones “I tore through this book. . . . Books like these are important: They track the journey of our thinking about food, adding evidence and offering guidance along the way.” —Wall Street Journal On the production line in American packing-houses, there is one cardinal rule: the chain never slows. Under pressure to increase supply, the supervisors of meat-processing plants have routinely accelerated the pace of conveyors, leading to inhumane conditions, increased accidents, and food of questionable, often dangerous quality. In The Chain, acclaimed journalist Ted Genoways uses the story of Hormel Foods and its most famous product, Spam—a recession-era staple—to probe the state of the meatpacking industry, from Minnesota to Iowa to Nebraska. Interviewing scores of line workers, union leaders, hog farmers, and local politicians and activists, Genoways reveals an industry pushed to its breaking point—while exposing alarming new trends, from sick or permanently disabled workers to conflict between small towns and immigrant labor. A searching exposé in the tradition of Upton Sinclair, Rachel Carson, and Eric Schlosser, The Chain is a mesmerizing story and an urgent warning about the hidden costs of the food we eat.

Last Chance to Eat

Last Chance to Eat
Author: Gina Mallet
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2004
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 9780393058413

Drawing on enough culinary experiences to fill several lifetimes, Mallet's irreverent memoir combines recollections of meals and their milieus with recipes and tasting tips.

Banana

Banana
Author: Dan Koeppel
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2008
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781594630385

"Award-winning journalist Dan Koeppel navigates across the planet and throughout history, telling the cultural and scientific story of the world's most ubiquitous fruit"--Page 4 of cover.

Serious Eater

Serious Eater
Author: Ed Levine
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2019-06-11
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 0525533540

"A hilarious and moving story of unconventional entrepreneurialism, passion, and guts." --Danny Meyer, CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group; Founder of Shake Shack; Author of Setting the Table Original recipes by J. Kenji López-Alt of The Food Lab and Stella Parks of BraveTart James Beard Award-winning founder of Serious Eats Ed Levine finally tells the mouthwatering and heartstopping story of building--and almost losing--one of the most acclaimed and beloved food sites in the world. In 2005, Ed Levine was a freelance food writer with an unlikely dream: to control his own fate and create a different kind of food publication. He wanted to unearth the world's best bagels, the best burgers, the best hot dogs--the best of everything edible. To build something for people like him who took everything edible seriously, from the tasting menu at Per Se and omakase feasts at Nobu down to mass-market candy, fast food burgers, and instant ramen. Against all sane advice, he created a blog for $100 and called it...Serious Eats. The site quickly became a home for obsessives who didn't take themselves too seriously. Intrepid staffers feasted on every dumpling in Chinatown and sampled every item on In-N-Out's secret menu. Talented recipe developers like The Food Lab's J. Kenji López-Alt and Stella Parks, aka BraveTart, attracted cult followings. Even as Serious Eats became better-known--even beloved and respected--every day felt like it could be its last. Ed secured handshake deals from investors and would-be acquirers over lunch only to have them renege after dessert. He put his marriage, career, and relationships with friends and family at risk through his stubborn refusal to let his dream die. He prayed that the ride would never end. But if it did, that he would make it out alive. This is the moving story of making a glorious, weird, and wonderful dream come true. It's the story of one food obsessive who followed a passion to terrifying, thrilling, and mouthwatering places--and all the serious eats along the way. Praise for Serious Eater "Read[s] more like a carefully crafted novel than a real person's life." --from the foreword by J. Kenji López-Alt "Wild, wacky, and entertaining...The book makes you hungry for Ed to succeed...and for lunch." --Christina Tosi, founder of Milk Bar "Serious Eater is seriously good!...you'll be so glad [Ed] invited you to a seat at his table." --Ree Drummond, author of The Pioneer Woman Cooks "After decades of spreading the good food gospel we get a glimpse of the missionary behind the mission." --Dan Barber, chef, Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns

An Edible History of Humanity

An Edible History of Humanity
Author: Tom Standage
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2010-05-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0802719910

A lighthearted chronicle of how foods have transformed human culture throughout the ages traces the barley- and wheat-driven early civilizations of the near East through the corn and potato industries in America.

On an Empty Stomach

On an Empty Stomach
Author: Tom Scott-Smith
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2020-04-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501748661

On an Empty Stomach examines the practical techniques humanitarians have used to manage and measure starvation, from Victorian "scientific" soup kitchens to space-age, high-protein foods. Tracing the evolution of these techniques since the start of the nineteenth century, Tom Scott-Smith argues that humanitarianism is not a simple story of progress and improvement, but rather is profoundly shaped by sociopolitical conditions. Aid is often presented as an apolitical and technical project, but the way humanitarians conceive and tackle human needs has always been deeply influenced by culture, politics, and society. Txhese influences extend down to the most detailed mechanisms for measuring malnutrition and providing sustenance. As Scott-Smith shows, over the past century, the humanitarian approach to hunger has redefined food as nutrients and hunger as a medical condition. Aid has become more individualized, medicalized, and rationalized, shaped by modernism in bureaucracy, commerce, and food technology. On an Empty Stomach focuses on the gains and losses that result, examining the complex compromises that arise between efficiency of distribution and quality of care. Scott-Smith concludes that humanitarian groups have developed an approach to the empty stomach that is dependent on compact, commercially produced devices and is often paternalistic and culturally insensitive.

Tomatoland

Tomatoland
Author: Barry Estabrook
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2012-04-24
Genre: Cooking
ISBN: 1449408419

2012 IACP Award Winner in the Food Matters category Supermarket produce sections bulging with a year-round supply of perfectly round, bright red-orange tomatoes have become all but a national birthright. But in Tomatoland, which is based on his James Beard Award-winning article, "The Price of Tomatoes," investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry. Fields are sprayed with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides. Tomatoes are picked hard and green and artificially gassed until their skins acquire a marketable hue. Modern plant breeding has tripled yields, but has also produced fruits with dramatically reduced amounts of calcium, vitamin A, and vitamin C, and tomatoes that have fourteen times more sodium than the tomatoes our parents enjoyed. The relentless drive for low costs has fostered a thriving modern-day slave trade in the United States. How have we come to this point? Estabrook traces the supermarket tomato from its birthplace in the deserts of Peru to the impoverished town of Immokalee, Florida, a.k.a. the tomato capital of the United States. He visits the laboratories of seedsmen trying to develop varieties that can withstand the rigors of agribusiness and still taste like a garden tomato, and then moves on to commercial growers who operate on tens of thousands of acres, and eventually to a hillside field in Pennsylvania, where he meets an obsessed farmer who produces delectable tomatoes for the nation's top restaurants. Throughout Tomatoland, Estabrook presents a who's who cast of characters in the tomato industry: the avuncular octogenarian whose conglomerate grows one out of every eight tomatoes eaten in the United States; the ex-Marine who heads the group that dictates the size, color, and shape of every tomato shipped out of Florida; the U.S. attorney who has doggedly prosecuted human traffickers for the past decade; and the Guatemalan peasant who came north to earn money for his parents' medical bills and found himself enslaved for two years. Tomatoland reads like a suspenseful whodunit as well as an expose of today's agribusiness systems and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases.

The Omnivore's Dilemma

The Omnivore's Dilemma
Author: Michael Pollan
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2007-08-28
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0143038583

"Outstanding . . . a wide-ranging invitation to think through the moral ramifications of our eating habits." —The New Yorker One of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year and Winner of the James Beard Award Author of This is Your Mind on Plants, How to Change Your Mind and the #1 New York Times Bestseller In Defense of Food and Food Rules What should we have for dinner? Ten years ago, Michael Pollan confronted us with this seemingly simple question and, with The Omnivore’s Dilemma, his brilliant and eye-opening exploration of our food choices, demonstrated that how we answer it today may determine not only our health but our survival as a species. In the years since, Pollan’s revolutionary examination has changed the way Americans think about food. Bringing wide attention to the little-known but vitally important dimensions of food and agriculture in America, Pollan launched a national conversation about what we eat and the profound consequences that even the simplest everyday food choices have on both ourselves and the natural world. Ten years later, The Omnivore’s Dilemma continues to transform the way Americans think about the politics, perils, and pleasures of eating.

The Fate of the West

The Fate of the West
Author: Bill Emmott
Publisher: Profile Books
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2017-04-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1782832998

When faced with global instability and economic uncertainty, it is tempting for states to react by closing borders, hoarding wealth and solidifying power. We have seen it at various times in Japan, France and Italy and now it is infecting much of Europe and America, as the vote for Brexit in the UK has vividly shown. This insularity, together with increased inequality of income and wealth, threatens the future role of the West as a font of stability, prosperity and security. Part of the problem is that the principles of liberal democracy upon which the success of the West has been built have been suborned, with special interest groups such as bankers accruing too much power and too great a share of the economic cake. So how is this threat to be countered? States such as Sweden in the 1990s, California at different times or Britain under Thatcher all halted stagnation by clearing away the powers of interest groups and restoring their societies' ability to evolve. To survive, the West needs to be porous, open and flexible. From reinventing welfare systems to redefining the working age, from reimagining education to embracing automation, Emmott lays out the changes the West must make to revive itself in the moment and avoid a deathly rigid future.