For your reading list – 8 books to consider from Food CEO

July 18th, 2010

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, Micheal Pollan (Penguin, 2009)

Food is the one thing that Americans hate to love and, as it turns out, love to hate. What we want to eat has been ousted by the notion of what we should eat, and it’s at this nexus of hunger and hang-up that Michael Pollan poses his most salient question: where is the food in our food?

What follows in In Defense of Food is a series of wonderfully clear and thoughtful answers that help us omnivores navigate the nutritional minefield that’s come to typify our food culture. Pollan shows that these convenient “healthy” alternatives to whole foods are appallingly inconvenient: our health has a nation has only deteriorated since we started exiling carbs, fats–even fruits–from our daily meals.

His razor-sharp analysis of the American diet (as well as its architects and its detractors) offers an inspiring glimpse of what it would be like if we could (a la Humpty Dumpty) put our food back together again and reconsider what it means to eat well. (Amazon review)

Organic Manifesto – How Organic Farming Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe, Maria Rodale (Rodale Press, 2010)

Granddaughter to Rodale’s founder, and its current CEO, the author offers a passionate, evenhanded, nonacademic argument for the overall wisdom (economical and ecological) for farming organic. Deeply aware of the public confusion and suspicion surrounding organic farming as a “hippie” cause, Rodale first persuades readers that years of chemical and pesticide use have poisoned our environment.

Rodale places blame for U.S. reliance on chemical saturated farming, especially employing the use of genetically modified seeds, mostly on powerful chemical companies’ manipulative advertising doublespeak, but also on government protection of conventional farmers.

In the end, Rodale does a vigorous job of debunking myths plaguing both sides. (Publisher’s Weekly, May 2010)

Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment, David Kirby (St. Martin’s Press, 2010)

In factory farms, thousands of animals are confined and rapidly fattened for slaughter, generating millions of gallons of animal waste, which is stored in open lagoons and sprayed into the air.

Kirby, author of the best-selling Evidence of Harm (2005), profiles three individuals who have been subjected to the stench, mess, environmental contamination, and health risks of megafarms.

Thanks to Kirby’s extraordinary journalism, we have the most reliable, irrefutable, and unforgettable testimony yet to the hazards of industrial animal farming. (Donna Seaman, Booklist)

Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety, Marion Nestle (University of California Press, 2010)

Food safety is a matter of intense public concern, and for good reason. Millions of annual cases of food poisonings raise alarm not only about the food served in restaurants and fast-food outlets but also about foods bought in supermarkets.

Marion Nestle, author of the critically acclaimed Food Politics, argues that ensuring safe food involves more than washing hands or cooking food to higher temperatures. It involves politics.

When it comes to food safety, billions of dollars are at stake, and industry, government, and consumers collide over issues of values, economics, and political power–and not always in the public interest. (Publisher’s review)

Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, From Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee, Bee Wilson (Princeton University Press, 2008)

Bad food has a history. Swindled tells it. Through a fascinating mixture of cultural and scientific history, food politics, and culinary detective work, Bee Wilson uncovers the many ways swindlers have cheapened, falsified, and even poisoned our food throughout history. In the hands of people and corporations who have prized profits above the health of consumers, food and drink have been tampered with in often horrifying ways–padded, diluted, contaminated, substituted, mislabeled, misnamed, or otherwise faked.

Arguing that industrialization, laissez-faire politics, and globalization have all hurt the quality of food, but also that food swindlers have always been helped by consumer ignorance, Swindled ultimately calls for both governments and individuals to be more vigilant. In fact, Wilson suggests, one of our best protections is simply to reeducate ourselves about the joys of food and cooking. (Publisher’s description)

The CAFO Reader, Daniel Imhoff, editor (University of California Press, 2010)

The CAFO Reader is a collection of essays by over 30 of today’s leading thinkers on one of the most important environmental and ethical issues of our time: the rise of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs, where increasing amounts of the world’s meat, dairy, eggs, fish, and seafood are produced.

These essays analyze and vividly depict the devastating impacts and current conditions in and around factory farms. The collection also provides a compelling vision of “putting the CAFO out to pasture,” in which food systems become more healthy, humane, and sustainable. The CAFO Reader will quickly become an invaluable educational resource in the battle to reform the tragic state of industrial livestock production. It will also inform and influence the growing public movement of activists, farmers, policy makers, and consumers who are aiming to make our food healthier for ourselves and the planet.

Spoiled: The Dangerous Truth About a Food Chain Gone Haywire, Nicols Fox (Penguin, 1998)

Despite frequent media accounts of such unpleasant matters as mad cow disease and outbreaks of food poisoning at fast-food restaurants, Nicols Fox argues, we know too little about the threat that current methods of food manufacture and distribution pose to health. Citing Center for Disease Control figures that put the food poisoning count alone at more than 81 million cases a year in the United States, she notes that in many countries it is unsafe to eat the skins of uncooked vegetables, eggs, ground meat, and other staples.

Part of the problem lies in advances in transportation and storage technology, which allow us to consume foods grown very far away and at all seasons; part lies in the fact that bacteria are evolving to survive efforts to contain them. Fox’s book is alarming–but appropriately so. (Amazon review)

This book is currently out of print but is available from numerous sellers on the Internet.

Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, Tristram Stuart (W.W. Norton, 2009)

With shortages, volatile prices, environmental disasters and nearly one billion people hungry, the world has a food problem – or thinks it does.

Rich countries waste around half of their food supplies: it is time to free food from the wastefulness of modern society – for the good of the planet and all its inhabitants. This book campaigns for a change in attitudes towards food production, in the industry and in our own homes.

Combining front-line investigation with startling new data, Waste shows how the way we live now has created a global food crisis – and what we can do to fix it.