Beyond the Grocery Store
Learn about food and the food industry, from the history of the humble potato to global agribusiness.
August 21, 2024
A Bone To Pick
The Good And Bad News About Food, With Wisdom, Insights, And Advice On Diets, Food Safety, Gmos, Farming, And More
Mark Bittman
Mark Bittman made headlines three years ago when it was revealed that, for the first time, the New York Times opinion page would feature a food writer to help us make sense of the tangled webs of food, health, environment, politics, and culture. As an opinion columnist, Mark has delighted us, enraged us, and inspired us to do more for ourselves and our world with the same no-nonsense style. In the tradition of his NYT bestselling Food Matters, this book collects the best of his columns, updated to reflect the latest research, and tied together with new material to give context and show how far we’ve come in just a few years. What emerges is a collection that shows us the story of who we are as a nation of cooks, eaters, and voters right now– Provided by publisher.
The Poison Squad
One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade For Food Safety At The Turn Of The Twentieth Century
Deborah Blum
Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley set out to ensure food safety. He selected food tasters to test various food additives and preservatives, letting them know that the substances could be harmful or deadly. The tasters were recognized for their courage, and became known as the poison squad.
Eating Dangerously
Why The Government Can’t Keep Your Food Safe And How You Can
Michael Booth, Jennifer Brown
Eating Dangerously explains to the American consumer how their food system works and more importantly how it doesn’t work. It also dishes up course after course of friendly advice gleaned from the cutting-edge laboratories, kitchens and courtrooms where the national food system is taking new shape. Anyone interested in knowing more about how their food makes it from field and farm to store and table will want the inside scoop on just how safe or unsafe that food may be.
Never Out Of Season
How Having The Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply And Our Future
Rob Dunn
A biologist explains how the scientific breeding of our food supply into only the hardiest and tastiest varieties has made these crops susceptible to Mother Nature and discusses how a single bug or virus can now cause a massive collapse,–NoveList. The bananas we eat today aren’t our parents’ bananas: We eat a recognizable, consistent fruit that was standardized in the 1960s from dozens into one basic banana. But because of that, the banana we love is dangerously susceptible to a pathogen that might wipe them out. That’s the story of our food today: Modern science has brought us produce in perpetual abundance–once-rare fruits are seemingly never out of season, and we breed and clone the hardiest, best-tasting varieties of the crops we rely on most. As a result, a smaller proportion of people on earth go hungry today than at any other moment in the last thousand years, and the streamlining of our food supply guarantees that the food we buy, from bananas to coffee to wheat, tastes the same every single time. Our corporate food system has nearly perfected the process of turning sunlight, water and nutrients into food. But our crops themselves remain susceptible to nature’s fury. And nature always wins.
The Wal-Mart Effect
How The World’s Most Powerful Company Really Works– And How It’s Transforming The American Economy
Charles Fishman
The Wal-Mart Effect: The overwhelming impact of the world’s largest company-due to its relentless pursuit of low prices-on retailers and manufacturers, wages and jobs, the culture of shopping, the shape of our communities, and the environment; a global force of unprecedented nature. Wal-Mart is not only the world’s largest company; it is also the largest company in the history of the world. Americans spend $26 million every hour at Wal-Mart, twenty-four hours of every day, every day of the year. Is the company a good thing or a bad thing? On the one hand, market guru Warren Buffett estimates that the company’s low prices save American consumers $10 billion a year. On the other, the behemoth is the number-one employer in thirty-seven of the fifty states yet has never let a union in the door. Though 70 percent of Americans now live within a fifteen-minute drive of a Wal-Mart store, we have not even begun to understand the true power of the company and the many ways it is shaping American life. We know about the lawsuits and the labor protests, but what we don’t know is how profoundly the “Wal-Mart effect” is shaping our lives. Fast Company senior editor Charles Fishman takes us on an unprecedented behind-the-scenes investigative expedition deep inside the many worlds of Wal-Mart. He reveals the radical ways in which the company is transforming America’s economy, our workforce, our communities, and our environment. Fishman penetrated the secrecy of Wal-Mart headquarters, interviewing twenty-five high-level former executives; he entered into the world of a host of Wal-Mart’s suppliers to uncover how the company strong-arms even the most established brands; and journeyed to the ports and factories, the fields and forests where Wal-Mart’s power is warping the very structure of the world’s market for goods. Wal-Mart is not just a retailer anymore, Fishman argues. It has become a kind of economic ecosystem, and anyone who wants to understand the forces shaping our world today must understand the company’s hidden reach.
Cowed
The Hidden Impact Of 93 Million Cows On America’s Health, Economy, Politics, Culture, And Environment
Denis Hayes
From leading ecology advocates, a revealing look at our dependence on cows and a passionate appeal for sustainable living. In Cowed, globally recognized environmentalists Denis and Gail Boyer Hayes offer a revealing analysis of how our beneficial, centuries-old relationship with bovines has evolved into one that now endangers us. Long ago, cows provided food and labor to settlers taming the wild frontier and helped the loggers, ranchers, and farmers who shaped the country’s landscape. Our society is built on the backs of bovines who indelibly stamped our culture, politics, and economics. But our national herd has doubled in size over the past hundred years to 93 million, with devastating consequences for the country’s soil and water. Our love affair with dairy and hamburgers doesn’t help either: eating one pound of beef produces a greater carbon footprint than burning a gallon of gasoline. Denis and Gail Hayes begin their story by tracing the co-evolution of cows and humans, starting with majestic horned aurochs, before taking us through the birth of today’s feedlot farms and the threat of mad cow disease. The authors show how cattle farming today has depleted America’s largest aquifer, created festering lagoons of animal waste, and drastically increased methane production. In their quest to find fresh solutions to our bovine problem, the authors take us to farms across the country from Vermont to Washington. They visit worm ranchers who compost cow waste, learn that feeding cows oregano yields surprising benefits, talk to sustainable farmers who care for their cows while contributing to their communities, and point toward a future in which we eat less, but better, beef. In a deeply researched, engagingly personal narrative, Denis and Gail Hayes provide a glimpse into what we can do now to provide a better future for cows, humans, and the world we inhabit. They show how our relationship with cows is part of the story of America itself.
Food Fight
Gmos And The Future Of The American Diet
McKay Jenkins
Are GMOs really that bad? A prominent environmental journalist takes a fresh look at what they actually mean for our food system and for us.
Bet The Farm
How Food Stopped Being Food
Frederick Kaufman
Investigates the hidden connection between global food and global finance by asking the simple question: Why can’t delicious, inexpensive, and healthy food be available to everyone on Earth? Reveals that money pouring into the global derivatives market in grain futures is having astonishing consequences that reach far beyond your dinner table, including the Arab Spring, bankrupt farmers, starving masses, and armies of scientists creating new GMO foods with U.S. marketing and shipping needs in mind instead of global nutrition. Our food is getting less healthy, less delicious, and more expensive even as the world’s biggest food companies and food scientists say things are better than ever and that the rest of us should leave it to them to feed the world. Readers of Bet the Farm will glimpse the power behind global food and understand what truly supports the system that has brought mass misery to our planet.
Maeve In America
Essays By A Girl From Somewhere Else
Maeve Higgins
Maeve Higgins was a bestselling author and comedian in her native Ireland when, at the grand old age of thirty-one, she left the only home she’d ever known in search of something more and found herself in New York City. Together, the essays in Maeve in America create a smart, funny, and revealing portrait of a woman who aims for the stars but sometimes hits the ceiling and the inimitable city that helped make her who she is.
The American Way Of Eating
Undercover At Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields And The Dinner Table
Tracie McMillan
What if you can’t afford nine-dollar tomatoes? That was the question award-winning journalist Tracie McMillan couldn’t escape as she watched the debate about America’s meals unfold, one that urges us to pay food’s true cost; which is to say, pay more. So in 2009 McMillan embarked on a groundbreaking undercover journey to see what it takes to eat well in America. For nearly a year, she worked, ate, and lived alongside the working poor to examine how Americans eat when price matters. From the fields of California, a Walmart produce aisle outside of Detroit, and the kitchen of a New York City Applebee’s, McMillan takes us into the heart of America’s meals. With startling intimacy she portrays the lives and food of Mexican garlic crews, Midwestern produce managers, and Caribbean line cooks, while also chronicling her own attempts to live and eat on meager wages. Along the way, she asked the questions still facing America a decade after the declaration of an obesity epidemic: Why do we eat the way we do? And how can we change it? To find out, McMillan goes beyond the food on her plate to examine the national priorities that put it there. With her absorbing blend of riveting narrative and formidable investigative reporting, McMillan takes us from dusty fields to clanging restaurant kitchens, linking her work to the quality of our meals and always placing her observations in the context of America’s approach not just to farms and kitchens but to wages and work. The surprising answers that McMillan found on her journey have profound implications for our food and agriculture, and also for how we see ourselves as a nation. Through stunning reportage, Tracie McMillan makes the simple case that city or country, rich or poor everyone wants good food. Fearlessly reported and beautifully written, The American Way of Eating goes beyond statistics and culture wars to deliver a book that is fiercely intelligent and compulsively readable. Talking about dinner will never be the same again.
Big-Box Swindle
The True Cost Of Mega-Retailers And The Fight For America’s Independent Businesses
Stacy Mitchell
Large retail chains have become the most powerful corporations in America and are rapidly transforming our economy, communities, and landscape. In this deft and revealing book, Stacy Mitchell illustrates how mega-retailers are fueling many of our most pressing problems, from the shrinking middle class to rising water pollution and diminished civic engagement. Mitchell”s investigation takes us from the suburbs of Cleveland to a fruit farm in California, the stockroom of an Oregon Wal-Mart, and a Pennsylvania town”s Main Street. She uncovers the shocking role government policy has played in the expansion of mega-retailers and builds a compelling case that communities composed of many small businesses are healthier and more prosperous than those dominated by large chains. More than a critique, The Big-Box Swindle draws on real life to show how some communities are successfully countering the spread of mega-retailers and rebuilding their local economies. Mitchell describes innovative approaches–from cutting-edge land-use policies to small-business initiatives–that together provide a detailed road map to a more prosperous and sustainable future.
Regenesis
Feeding The World Without Devouring The Planet
George Monbiot
Drawing on advances in soil ecology, George Monbiot reveals how our changing understanding of the world beneath our feet could allow us to grow more food with less farming. He meets the people who are unlocking these methods, from the fruit and vegetable grower revolutionizing our understanding of fertility; through breeders of perennial grains, liberating the land from ploughs and chemicals; to the scientists pioneering new ways to grow protein and fat. Together, they show how to transform not only our food system but our entire relationship to the living world.
Hooked
Food, Free Will, And How The Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions
Michael Moss
Everyone knows how hard it can be to maintain a healthy diet. But what if some of the decisions we make about what to eat are beyond our control? Is it possible that processed food is addictive, like drugs or alcohol? Motivated by these questions, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Michael Moss began searching for answers, to find the true peril in our food. In Hooked, Moss explores the science of addiction and uncovers what the scientific and medical communities–as well as food manufacturers–already know, which is that food can, in some cases, be even more addictive than alcohol, cigarettes, or drugs. Our bodies are hard-wired for sweets, so food manufacturers have deployed fifty-six types of sugar to add to their products, creating in us the expectation that everything should be cloying; we’ve evolved to prefer convenient meals, so three-fourths of the calories we get from groceries come from ready-to-eat foods. Moss goes on to show how the processed food industry has not only tried to deny this troubling discovery, but exploit it to its advantage. For instance, in a response to recent dieting trends, food manufacturers have simply turned junk food into junk diets, filling grocery stores with “diet” foods that are hardly distinguishable from the products that got us into trouble in the first place. With more people unable to make dieting work for them, manufacturers are now claiming to add ingredients that can effortlessly cure our compulsive eating habits. A gripping account of the legal battles, insidious marketing campaigns, and cutting-edge food science that have brought us to our current public health crisis, Hooked lays out all that the food industry is doing to exploit and deepen our addictions, and shows us what we can do so that we can one again seize control.
Salt, Sugar, Fat
How The Food Giants Hooked Us
Michael Moss
The author explores his theory that the food industry’s used three essential ingredients to control much of the world’s diet. Traces the rise of the processed food industry and how addictive salt, sugar, and fat have enabled its dominance in the past half century, revealing deliberate corporate practices behind current trends in obesity, diabetes, and other health challenges. Features examples from some of the most recognizable and profitable companies and brands of the last half century, including Kraft, Coca-Cola, Lunchables, Kellogg, Frito-Lay, Nestle, Oreos, Cargill, Capri Sun, and many more.
Real Food Fake Food
Why You Don’t Know What You’re Eating & What You Can Do About It
Larry Olmsted
You’ve seen the headlines: Parmesan cheese made from wood pulp. Lobster rolls containing no lobster at all. Extra-virgin olive oil that isn’t. So many fake foods are in our supermarkets, our restaurants, and our kitchen cabinets that it’s hard to know what we’re eating anymore. In Real Food/Fake Food, award-winning journalist Larry Olmsted convinces us why real food matters and empowers consumers to make smarter choices. Olmsted brings readers into the unregulated food industry, revealing the shocking deception that extends from high-end foods like olive oil, wine, and Kobe beef to everyday staples such as coffee, honey, juice, and cheese. It’s a massive bait and switch in which counterfeiting is rampant and in which the consumer ultimately pays the price. But Olmstead does more than show us what foods to avoid. A bona fide gourmand, he travels to the sources of the real stuff to help us recognize what to look for, eat, and savor: genuine Parmigiano-Reggiano from Italy, fresh-caught grouper from Florida, authentic port from Portugal. Real foods that are grown, raised, produced, and prepared with care by masters of their craft. Part cautionary tale, part culinary crusade, Real Food/Fake Food is addictively readable, mouth-wateringly enjoyable, and utterly relevant.
Resetting The Table
Straight Talk About The Food We Grow And Eat
Robert Paarlberg
A bold, science-based corrective to the groundswell of misinformation about food and how it’s produced, examining in detail local and organic food, food companies, nutrition labeling, ethical treatment of animals, environmental impacts, and every other aspect from farm to table. Consumers want to know more about their food–including the farm it came from, the chemicals used, the nutrition value, how the animals were treated, and costs to the environment. They are being told that organic foods, unprocessed and sourced from small local farms, do the best in passing such tests. Robert Paarlberg reviews the evidence and disagrees. He finds that global food markets have improved our diet, and that industrial” farming has recently turned green, thanks to GPS-guided precision methods that are now cutting energy use and chemical pollution. America’s serious obesity crisis does not come from farms, or from food deserts, but instead from “food swamps” created by food companies, retailers, and restaurant chains. Animal welfare is lagging behind, but progress can be made through continued advocacy, more progressive regulations, and perhaps plant-based imitation meat. Paarlberg finds solutions that can make sense for farmers and consumers alike. From Farm to Table is a road map through the rapidly changing worlds of food and farming, laying out a practical path to bring the two together.
The End Of Food
Thomas Pawlick
Pawlick exposes an alarming trend in the food available in our grocery stores. This is not an argument about unhealthy, processed foods, rather it exposes the problems with all foods, including fruits and vegetables that people commonly assume are healthy.
Potato
A History Of The Propitious Esculent
John Reader
The potato—humble, lumpy, bland, familiar—is a decidedly unglamorous staple of the dinner table. Or is it? John Reader’s narrative on the role of the potato in world history suggests we may be underestimating this remarkable tuber. From domestication in Peru 8,000 years ago to its status today as the world’s fourth largest food crop, the potato has played a starring—or at least supporting—role in many chapters of human history. In this witty and engaging book, Reader opens our eyes to the power of the potato. Whether embraced as the solution to hunger or wielded as a weapon of exploitation, blamed for famine and death or recognized for spurring progress, the potato has often changed the course of human events. Reader focuses on sixteenth-century South America, where the indigenous potato enabled Spanish conquerors to feed thousands of conscripted native people; eighteenth-century Europe, where the nutrition-packed potato brought about a population explosion; and today’s global world, where the potato is an essential food source but also the world’s most chemically-dependent crop. Where potatoes have been adopted as a staple food, social change has always followed. It may be ‘just’ a humble vegetable, John Reader shows, yet the history of the potato has been anything but dull.
Coffeeland
One Man’s Dark Empire And The Making Of Our Favorite Drug
Augustine Sedgewick
The epic story of the rise of coffee in the Americas, and how it connected and divided the modern world. Sedgewick reveals how the growth of coffee production, trade, and consumption went hand in hand with the rise of the scientific idea of energy as a universal force, which transformed thinking about how the human body works as well as ideas about the relationship of one person’s work to another’s. In the process, both El Salvador and the United States earned the nickname “Coffeeland,” though for radically different reasons, and with consequences that reach into the present. This history of how coffee came to be produced by the world’s poorest people and consumed by its richest opens up a unique perspective on how the modern globalized world works, ultimately provoking a reconsideration of what it means to be connected to far-away people and places through the familiar things that make up our everyday lives.
Cheap
The High Cost Of Discount Culture
Ellen Shell
An Atlantic correspondent evaluates America’s penchant for making and buying cheap products while assessing the true economic, political, and psychological costs of such goods, in a report that argues that a focus on low prices is promoting negative practices.
The Secret History Of Food
Strange But True Stories About The Origins Of Everything We Eat
Matt Siegel
Is Italian olive oil really Italian, or are we dipping our bread in lamp oil? Why are we masochistically drawn to foods that can hurt us, like hot peppers? Far from being a classic American dish, is apple pie actually . . . English? As a species, we’re hardwired to obsess over food,” Matt Siegel explains as he sets out “to uncover the hidden side of everything we put in our mouths.” Siegel also probes subjects ranging from the myths–and realities–of food as aphrodisiac, to how one of the rarest and most exotic spices in all the world (vanilla) became a synonym for uninspired sexual proclivities, to the role of food in fairy- and morality tales. He even makes a well-argued case for how ice cream helped defeat the Nazis. The Secret History of Food is a rich and satisfying exploration of the historical, cultural, scientific, sexual, and, yes, culinary subcultures of this most essential realm.
Sugar In The Blood
A Family’s Story Of Slavery And Empire
Andrea Stuart
The author of “The Rose of Martinique” presents a history of the interdependence of sugar, slavery and colonial settlement in the New World through the story of the author’s ancestors, exploring the myriad connections between sugar cultivation and her family’s identity, genealogy and financial stability.
The Aisles Have Eyes
How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, And Define Your Power
Joseph Turow
By one expert’s prediction, within twenty years half of Americans will have body implants that tell retailers how they feel about specific products as they browse their local stores. The notion may be outlandish, but it reflects executives’ drive to understand shoppers in the aisles with the same obsessive detail that they track us online. In fact, a hidden surveillance revolution is already taking place inside brick-and-mortar stores, where Americans still do most of their buying. Drawing on his interviews with retail executives, analysis of trade publications, and experiences at insider industry meetings, advertising and digital studies expert Joseph Turow pulls back the curtain on these trends, showing how a new hyper-competitive generation of merchants– including Macy’s, Target, and Walmart– is already using data mining, in-store tracking, and predictive analytics to change the way we buy, undermine our privacy, and define our reputations.
Pandora’s Lunchbox
How Processed Food Took Over The American Meal
Melanie Warner
If a piece of individually wrapped cheese retains its shape, color, and texture for years, what does it say about the food we eat and feed our children? Former New York Times” business reporter and mother Melanie Warner decided to explore that question when she observed the phenomenon of the indestructible cheese. She began an investigative journey that takes her to research labs, food science departments, and factories around the country. What she discovered provides a rare, eye-opening–and sometimes disturbing–account of what we’re really eating. Warner looks at how decades of food science have resulted in the cheapest, most abundant, most addictive, and most nutritionally devastating food in the world, and she uncovers startling evidence about the profound health implications of the packaged and fast foods that we eat on a daily basis.
Food, Inc
How Industrial Food Is Making Us Sicker, Fatter, And Poorer– And What You Can Do About It
Karl Weber
Food, Inc. is guaranteed to shake up our perceptions of what we eat. This powerful documentary deconstructing the corporate food industry in America was hailed by Entertainment Weekly as “more than a terrific movie — it’s an important movie.” Aided by expert commentators such as Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, the film poses questions such as: Where has my food come from, and who has processed it? What are the giant agribusinesses and what stake do they have in maintaining the status quo of food production and consumption? How can I feed my family healthy foods affordably? Expanding on the film’s themes, the book Food, Inc. will answer those questions through a series of challenging essays by leading experts and thinkers. This book will encourage those inspired by the film to learn more about the issues, and act to change the world.
Eating Tomorrow
Agribusiness, Family Farmers, And The Battle For The Future Of Food
Timothy Wise
A major new book that shows the world already has the tools to feed itself, without expanding industrial agriculture or adopting genetically modified seeds. From the Small Planet Institute expert, few challenges are more daunting than feeding a global population projected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050, at a time when climate change is making it increasingly difficult to successfully grow crops. In response, corporate and philanthropic leaders have called for major investments in industrial agriculture, including genetically modified seed technologies. Reporting from Africa, Mexico, India, and the United States, Timothy A. Wise’s Eating Tomorrow discovers how in country after country agribusiness and its well-heeled philanthropic promoters have hijacked food policies to feed corporate interests. Most of the world, Wise reveals, is fed by hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers, people with few resources and simple tools but a keen understanding of what and how to grow food. These same farmers who already grow more than 70 percent of the food eaten in developing countries can show the way forward as the world warms and population increases. Wise takes readers to remote villages to see how farmers are rebuilding soils with ecologically sound practices and nourishing a diversity of native crops without chemicals or imported seeds. They are growing more and healthier food; in the process, they are not just victims in the climate drama but protagonists who have much to teach us all.