Currently browsing posts about: Books

Ashley N. Gearhardt, Kelly D. Brownell, Mark S. Gold, and Marc N. Potenza, editors.  Food & Addiction: A Comprehensive Handbook, Second Edition.  Oxford University Press, 2024.  570 pages.

This is the second edition of a book I wrote about in 2012.

At the time, I said:

Brownell and Gold have produced an instant classic.  Food and Addiction presents a comprehensive, authoritative, and compelling case for considering whether food is addictive.  Its chapters raise serious questions about our current laissez-faire attitude toward food marketing, especially to children.  This book is a must read for everyone who cares about the causes and consequences of obesity and the need for food policies that better promote health.  It is a game changer.  Readers will never look at food the same way again.

Much has happened since then to focus greater attention on the ways food triggers addictive-like eating behavior.

• Michael Moss’s books, Salt, Sugar, Fat, and Hooked.  These document how food companies deliberately formulate products to make them irresistible (“you can’t eat just one”).
• The emergence of the concept of ultra-processed foods as a researchable category.
• Kevin Hall et al’s demonstration that ultra-processed foods encourage people to eat more calories but not realize it.
• The increase in research using the Yale Food Addiction Scale, and
• The research described and reviewed in this book.

All of this makes an increasingly convincing case that the word “addiction” applies to food as well as to other addictive substances, and that similar proportions of people (10% to 15%) meet criteria for addiction; everyone eats, but not everyone meets those criteria.

The editors’ introductory and concluding chapters lay out the diagnostic and policy issues.

The short chapters address biological, behavioral, clinical, and legal correlates of food addiction.

They are written by a authors who address these issues from enormously different , but highly critical, perspectives ranging from the exceedingly personal to the big-picture political.

Is anything missing here?  As with any multi-authored book, this one undoubtedly took years to produce.  That makes it a few years out of date in fast-moving areas.  It does not cover recent research on ultra-processed foods, Kevin Hall’s experiment, the concept of food “noise,” or the way the new GLP-1 drugs might interact with addictive behavior.

But, this is the resource of food addiction, a great gift to the addiction-perplexed and an enormous public service at a time when it is badly needed.

Sara B. Franklin.  The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America.  Atria Books, 2024.  316 pages.

I badly wanted to read this book.  Sara Franklin got her doctorate in Food Studies in my NYU department and I met Judith Jones several times in the 1990s and 2000s (she died in 2017).

Judith Jones is famous in food circles for rescuing Julia Child’s manuscript for Mastering the Art of French Cooking and getting Knopf to publish it.

But the best way to understand her impact is to take a look at the jaw-dropping list of authors she edited; it takes up two and a half double-columned pages, and includes poets (WH Auden, Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds) and writers (Andre Gide, John Hersey, Langton Hughes), as well as a breathtaking list of food writers: MFK Fisher, Marion Cunningham, Elizabeth David, Scott Peakock, Elisabeth Rosin, Jeffrey Steingarten, and on and on.  And, oh yes, Anne Frank.

The story here is of a woman who began her editing career in 1949 when the best women could aspire to was secretarial work.  She worked her way up through the system, but did not fight it and was always treated as someone who didn’t matter much, despite that incredible list of authors, many of them deeply devoted to Judith for what she did for them.

As an author, I can tell you that a good editor is a treasure and she was a terrific one.  She got her authors to clarify, explain, focus, and make their books readable, understandable, and enjoyable for wide audiences.  This takes insight and the ability to inspire authors to do their best work—genuine talent.  It also requires stepping back and letting the authors shine.  This book details Judith’s way of staying in the background, not always to her advantage.

Sara Franklin got to know Judith Jones, was given access to her papers, and conducted loads of interviews as the basis for this book.  She tells the story of one woman’s career, but sets it against the background of changes in society and in the food world since the 1950s and in the lives of the authors she edited—the era that I too have lived through and these are people I know, explaining why I so enjoyed reading this.

I especially like the way Sara weaves herself into the book but mostly lets Judith speak for herself.  An excerpt:

“Dick [Judith’s husband] didn’t take criticism well,” Judith told me, “And I thought it awkward to play the two roles,” editor and wife at once, “so I just shut up.  I would have liked more back and forth, but people have their hang-ups”…Judith had been caught off guard by how overwhelmed she’d become by family life, and the perpetual juggle of working motherhood.  Keeping up with the demands of her career while remaining attentive and available to Dick and the children, Judith found, was an almost impossible balancing act, with “so much,” she remarked, “dumped on the woman.”  With no models to look to, Judith was flying blind. “I hadn’t really thought about it,” she told me.  “It just seemed natural.”

As I said, a classic woman’s story of the era.

Much of the book describes Judith’s acquisition of important books and the ways she worked with their authors.  I wish I had had the chance to work with her.  I know I’m not alone in thinking that would have been an honor and a privilege.

Sara’s book is terrific.  And we are so proud of her.

The book was reviewed in the New York Times: She Was More Than the Woman Who Made Julia Child Famous: In “The Editor,” Sara B. Franklin argues that Judith Jones was a “publishing legend,” transcending industry sexism to champion cookbooks — and Anne Frank.

Marianna Chilton.  The Painful Truth about Hunger in America: Why We Must Unlearn Everything We Think We Know—and Start Again.  MIT Press, 2024. 366 pages.

MIT Press asked me to do a back-cover blurb for this book, which I was pleased to do.

Marianna Chilton’s uncompromising book cuts to the heart of what’s wrong with America’s “safety net” for poverty and hunger.  Her tough analysis derives from the lived experience of people dependent on this system despite its demonstrable inadequacies, inequities, and indignities.

This is one tough book to read, as Chilton warns us right from the start.  Accepting food and financial assistance is a deeply humiliating experience.  Worse, it is intended to be so, right from the start.

Chilton’s work is highly unusual.  She gains the trust of participants in this system by listening closely when they tell her what it is really like for them, and how they feel about it.

This system is so bad and self-sustaining that nothing short of  a complete overhaul can fix it.  We could, should, must do better.

She says:

Poverty costs the United States at least $1.03 trillion a year.  For every dollar spent on reducing childhood poverty, the country would save at least $7 in government spending to address the health and social problems that arise from poverty…To fix this, we need to spend more money to help people avoid poverty; we need to fix the tax code, wage structures, and many other policies that exclude and exploit people who are poor so the wealthy will stop profiting off them.

Chilton recommends the universals:

• Universal health care
• Universal Basic Income
• Universal school meals
• Universal child care

Anything short of that keeps the current system in place.

Ronnie Cummins and André Leu.  The Regenerative Agriculture Solution: A Revolutionary Approach to Building Soil, Creating Climate Resilience, and Supporting Human and Planetary Health.  Chelsea Green, 2024.

I was asked to do a blurb for this one, and did:

This book is a testament to the vision of the late Ronnie Cummins.  His friend, André Leu, memorializes Cummins’ lifelong work with this overview of the demonstrable benefits of regenerative agriculture for everything in the book’s subtitle, and more.  Cummins’ case study on agave illustrates these benefits perfectly, making this book a useful as well as touching tribute.

This short book is a touchingly sentimental project.  It started out as Ronnie Cummins’ account of how to use agave fronds (which otherwise would be wasted), ground to the consistency of cole slaw and then fermented, for sustainable animal feed.

But Cummins died after writing only two chapters.  The publisher thought agave was too narrow a topic to make book length; it advised broadening the scope to regenerative agriculture with agave as a case study.  Leu, an old friend of Cummins’, took this on.

So there are really two books here, on two topics, by two different authors, in two distinct voices.  Even so, it works as a basic introduction to the benefits of regenerative agriculture for sustainability.

I think the agave example would be better as a monograph, but Cummins hadn’t done enough on it.  Too bad.  He was really excited about its possibilities.  Agave stores moisture from air and does not need much water to grow.

So I projected, if you could grow enough plants, in this case billions of agaves and companion trees, grow them large enough, and interplant them on millions and millions of acres of the world’s currently decarbonized and unproductive rangelands, you could conceivably draw down a critical mass of excess carbon from the atmosphere (where too much CO₂ contributes to climate change) and put in into the plants and trees aboveground, and into the soil belowground, where it belongs.  By greening the desert and the drylands you could dramatically increase soil fertility, retain and store rainfall, restore landscapes and biodiversity, reforest semi-desert areas, regenerate rural livelihoods, and eventually restabilize the climate.  I could hardly fall asleep.

This book is Cummins’ living memorial.

Julian Baggini.  How the World Eats: A Global Food Philosophy. Granta, 2024.  443 pages.

I did a blurb for this one:

How the World Eats is an enormously wide overview of how people throughout the entire world–from hunter-gatherers to NASA astronauts–view, exist within, manage, and try to improve their food systems.  Baggini’s philosophy makes sense.  We need sustainable food systems to feed the world.

When I say “enormously wide,” I’m not kidding.  Baggini has interviewed an amazing number of people, including me.  I do not remember our interview (I don’t keep track of interviews), but he quotes me extensively—and my book Food Politics—especially in the chapter titled “The Big Business of Food.”

The book is long, not least because Baggini lets his interviews speak for themselves, regardless of their opinions on controversial food issues.  He does not use the book to argue with the people he interviewed.  If you want to know what everyone, everywhere thinks about food, from every side of an issue, this is a good starting place.

Eventually, Bagggini comes out in favor of food systems that are, in his words, “holistic, circular, pluralistic, foodcentric, resourceful, compassionate, and equitable.”

If we were to adopt the principles of Holism, Circularity, Pluralism, Foodcentrism, Resourcefulness, Compassion, and Equitability, many of the desiderata we have for the food world would come along for the ride. Everyone is in favour of sustainability, and that is what we would get if we followed these seven principles.  Similarly, a circular, plural and resourceful food system is also an efficient ne.  When the main things people want flow naturally from a set of principles, that is a good sign that those principles are the right ones.  p. 361

James Merchant and Robert Martin, eds. Public Health Impacts of Industrial Farm Animal Production.  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024.

I served on the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production with both authors about 15 years ago and was happy to do a blurb for their book.

This hard-hitting book defies meat industry pressure and obfuscation to document the devastating effects of its current production methods on the quality of air and water and on human health.  It doesn’t have to be this way.  Here’s a roadmap for a healthier and environmentally sustainable meat production system.

The book begins with an account of meat industry interference with the work of the Pew Commission and researchers investigating the health and polluting effects of CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations).

Our experience, and that of several of the authors of the 12 chapters in this book, have encountered considerable interference with their academic freedom as exerted directly by industrial agriculture or its pressure on academic administrators. Ensuring academic freedom, unbiased funding and unbiased research is critical to a sustainable environment and to protect the public’s health…. The pressure included industry harassment and intimidation of community residents, industry intrusion seeking to identify study subjects and research records, pressure applied to University administrators, and intimidation and litigation threats.

The multi-authored chapters document the extensive damage to health, the environment, and social justice caused by CAFOs, and recommend ways to deal with it.

Enforcing existing laws about air, water, soil, odor pollution, and animal welfare would be a good starting point.

This book was sent to me by its publisher (Penguin) and was it ever fun to read.  Twilley’s subtitle says it all.  She connects it to everything.

I particularly enjoyed two things in this book: its broad scope, from home ice boxes to economic development in Rwanda, and her personal experiences visiting icy cold packing plants, storage facilities, trucks, and seed vaults on the Faroe Islands.

Here is Twilley on bananas, of all things:

Contrary to popular belief, bananas are the ultimate refrigerated fruit.  In order to be a global commodity rather than an exotic luxury, the banana depends on a seamless network of thermal control.  This comes as something of a shock to most people.  Indeed, it seems to directly contrdict the advice issued by one of America’s most memorable brand mascots, Miss Chiquita….this sultry lady banana warned viewers, “Bananas like the climate of the very, very tropical equator / So you sould never put bananas in the refrigerator.”   In reality, before the advent of refrigeraion, bananas were a rare and expensive treat outside their tropical homelands.

Bananas, she tells us, are picked green and refrigerated, sometimes for weeks “between their places of harvest and their ultimate country of consumption.”

Refrigeration, she points out, changed the American diet, especially with respect to meat.

The ripple effect of this transformation shapes the geography and economics of American meat to this day.  Urban stockyard workers had been unionized since the 1930s; employees of the new rural processing plants were not: they were and are paid much less.  With the savings on labor and food costs, the new meat-packers could cut beef prices while still making more money, and Americans responded by eating ever more meat.

The book focuses on the Big Picture:

In short, our food system is frostbitten: it has been injured by its exposure to cold.  Part of the reason for that is that refrigeration was implemented, for the most part, in order to optimize markets rather than human and environmental health.

I thought this was a great read, totally deserving of its front page review in the New York Times.

But I wish she had cited Hi’ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart’s Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Duke University Press, 2022)   Hi’ilei’s terrific book covers some of the same themes with respect to Hawai’i.  She got her doctorate in my NYU department and is now teaching at Yale.  We are proud of her!

And one tiny quibble.  Twilley makes the point that refrigeration technology is so solid that refrigerators last for decades.  Well, they used to.  Today, not so much.  Those big expensive machines are not expected to last more than a few years, not because of the refrigeration mechanisms but because of the electronics.  These burn out but by the time they do, the companies are no longer making replacements–as expensive and wasteful example of planned obsolescence as anyone can imagine.  I was sorry she didn’t mention this.

This brand new book—all 498 pages of it—is open access.

As the publisher explains,

• This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access
• Analyzes the connections between agriculture and resource use, commodity trade, food businesses, and retail markets
• Provides diagrams and data visualizations to explain, predict, and assess changes in the food system
• Features rich visualizations and primary source information for updated charts from US and international sources

The authors have gone to a lot of trouble to make basic economic concepts clear.  For example,

We use the term monopoly to describe a market with just one seller and the less common term monopsony when there is just one buyer. The two are symmetrical, so both kinds of market power are sometimes called monopoly power. But distinguishing between monopoly and monopsony is useful because food businesses can potentially exercise both at the same time. For example, a large dairy processor and distributor might become a monopsonist in buying raw milk from farmers and a monopolist in selling dairy products to consumers. Their potential market power is ‘two-sided’, similar to online platforms for food delivery that could potentially become the only intermediary between restaurants and customers.

They also have lots of ifnteresting points to make.

The persistence of family farming is among the most surprising facts about the economics of food. In the U.S. and elsewhere most farms do not sell directly to consumers but operate behind the scenes, selling their produce in bulk to specialists for transport and distribution, often for use as ingredients in packaged and processed foods. Unlike farms, the food companies with whom consumers usually interact are typically owned by investors and run by hired managers. They buy ingredients from various sources, often combining produce from many different farms. Consumers everywhere in the world often seek out opportunities to buy directly from individual farmers, but that is special in part because it is relatively rare.

Take advantage of this offer!

• Download book PDF
• Download book EPU