I hope everyone is enjoying the weekend! I’ve got some new books to add to my reading list that you might be interested in!
1. The Locavore Way by Amy Cotler
Discover how wonderful it tastes to be a locavore. Fresh fruits and vegetables, picked at the height of their ripeness; flavorful meats from humanely raised and organically fed animals; and pungent, handcrafted cheeses – all these foods and many more are waiting to be found and savored, no matter where you live or what your budget is. Amy Cotler shares all of her secrets for sourcing and using the best that your community has to offer.
A long advocate of local eating, Amy Cotler has worked as a chef, caterer, cooking instructor, recipe developer and cookbook author. She served as the founding director of Berkshire Grown, a regional organization that has received national recognition as a model for local food advocacy. Cotler was a food forum host for The New York Times on the Web and a major contributor to the revised Joy of Cooking.
2. Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal by Tristram Stuart
With shortages, volatile prices, and nearly 1 billion people hungry, the world has a food problem – or thinks it does. Farmers, manufacturers, supermarkets, and consumers in North America and Europe discard up to half of their food – enough to feed all the world’s hungry at least three times over. Forests are destroyed and nearly one-tenth of the West’s greenhouse gas emissions are released growing food that will never be eaten. While affluent nations throw away food through neglect, in the developing world crops rot because farmers lack the means to process, store, and transport them to market.
But there could be surprisingly painless remedies for what has become one of the world’s most pressing environmental and social problems. Waste traces the problem around the globe from the top to the bottom of the food production chain. Tristram Stuart’s journey takes him from the streets of New York to China, Pakistan, and Japan, and back to his home in England. Introducing us to foraging pigs, potato farmers, and food industry CEOs, Stuart encounters grotesque examples of profligacy but also inspiring innovations and ways of making the most of what we have. The journey is a personal one, as Stuart is a dedicated freegan, choosing to live off discarded or self-produced food in order to highlight the global food waste scandal.
Combining frontline investigation with startling new data, Waste shows how the way we live has created a global food crisis – and what we can do to fix it.
3. Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
Like many others, Jonathan Safran Foer spent his teenage and college years oscillating between omnivore and vegetarian. But on the brink of fatherhood – facing the prospect of having to make dietary choices on a child’s behalf – his casual questioning took on an urgency. So Foer set out to find answers for himself. This quest ultimately required him to visit factory farms in the middle of the night, dissect the emotional ingredients of meals from his childhood, and probe some of his most primal instincts about right and wrong. This book is what he found.
Brilliantly synthesizing philosophy, literature, science, memoir, and his own detective work, Eating Animals explores the many stories we use to justify out eating habits – folklore and pop culture, family traditions and national myth, apparent facts and inherent fictions – and how such tales can lull us into a brutal forgetting.
4. Don’t Eat This Book by Morgan Spurlock
Can a man live on fast food alone? Morgan Spurlock tried to do just that. For thirty days, he ate nothing by McDonald’s as part of an investigation into the effect of fast food on American health. The resulting documentary, Super Size Me, earned him and Academy Award nomination and a world-wide release that broke box office records.
But there is much more to this story than Spurlock’s food-humored “McSickness.” In Don’t Eat This Book, Spurlock examines what’s happening across the country – in schools, hospitals, and homes – and in school lunch programs, the marketing of fast food, and the sharp decline in emphasis on health and physical education. He looks at why fast food is so tasty, cheap, and ultimately seductive, and what Americans can do to turn the rising tide of obesity, hypertension, and diabetes that has accompanied its ever-growing popularity. He interviews experts in twenty US cities – from surgeons general and kids to lawmakers and marketing gurus – who share their research, opinions, and “gut feelings” on our ever-expanding girth and suggest what we can all do to offset a health crisis of super-sized proportions.
** Also, has anyone been watching that new show on ABC, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution? If not you should check it out, it’s quite eye-opening!
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