Currently browsing posts about: Books

Kate Harrington and Mary McIntyre.  Savor: Stories of Community, Culture & Food.  Edited by Adrienne Cachelin.   Foreword by Gary Paul Nabhan.  Available from www.savorbook.com, 2015.

Proceeds from sales of this book go to support the Glendale-Mt. View Community Learning Center where the authors work.  I liked the community aspects of this book so much that I did a blurb for it.

I can’t think of a better way to build community–to bring people of diverse cultures and histories together in common cause–than to ask them to describe what they most love to eat.  The Glendale Community Project has done just that and to gorgeous effect.  This book should inspire anyone to dig out treasured family recipes and share them with friends, new and old. 

Cricket Azima.  Everybody Can Cook.  DRL (Different Roads to Learning) Books, 2015.

This is for kids ages two and up.  It’s more than a cookbook.  It’s a curriculum. Cricket Azima, who founded and heads The Creative Kitchen, aims this at all kids, but especially those with physical and developmental disabilities.

I gave it a blurb:

People like me are always talking about how important it is to teach kids to cook.  You aren’t sure how?  Cricket Azima’s Everybody Can Cook is just what you need to have fun with your kids in the kitchen.  The recipes are easy and delicious.  Get your kids to start making dinner!

Lisa Chase and Vern Grubinger.  Food, Farms, and Community: Exploring Food Systems.  University of New Hampshire Press, 2014.

Here’s my blurb for this excellent and most useful book:

If you haven’t a clue as to what’s meant by food systems, read Food, Farms, and Community right now.  The book covers the territory from farm to fork, clarifying the complexities and focusing on what’s really important: what to do to create food and farming systems that promote the health of people and the planet.

Enjoy the summer weekend!

Megan Kimble.  Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food.  William Morrow, 2015 

I liked this book and did a blurb for it:

Confused about why nutritionists like me advise eating relatively unprocessed foods?   Megan Kimble spends a year taking a deep dive into the meaning of processing by trying to an unprocessed life, and on careful budget yet.  Part memoir, Unprocessed takes us through Kimble’s evolving understanding that that we have real choices about the way we eat and that these choices greatly matter for our health, economics, and sense of community.

While celebrating the Fourth of July, why not take time for some thoughtful reading?

Joel K. Bourne, Jr.  The End of Plenty: The Race to Feed a Crowded World.  WW Norton, 2015.

Here’s my blurb for this one:

The End of Plenty takes a thoroughly researched and exceptionally thoughtful and balanced look at the consequences of industrial farming.  Joel Bourne’s courageous conclusion: to feed the world’s burgeoning population, agriculture must change and population increase must stop.  His book should convince every reader of the compelling need to address world food problems through more skillful and sustainable agronomy, but also through education, especially of women, and universal family planning.

NOTE: FoodPolitics.com is going offline.  Will return June 21

Soda Politics is in press.

It comes out from Oxford University Press on October 1.

It has a Foreword by Mark Bittman and an Afterward by Neal Baer (my grateful thanks to both).

For information about Soda Politics, go to:

• The Oxford University Press website
• The book’s page on Amazon.com
• My Amazon author’s page
• The page for it on this site
• The Table of Contents

Enjoy!

F. Bailey Norwood, Pascal A. Oltenacu, Michelle S. Calvo-Lorenzo, and Sarah Lancaster.  Agricultural & Food Controversies: What Everyone Needs to Know.  Oxford University Press, 2015.

This book purports to take an objective look at “why equally smart and kind people can form vastly different opinions about food.”

Good luck with “objective.”

These authors are professors in agriculture departments in state universities (Oklahoma and Florida) who wish that controversial subjects in food and agriculture could be explored “while paying respect to the character and intellect of both sides.”

But then they take on liberals.

Liberals, they say, “have a negative view of big business, and…comprise the majority of food activists, and you have a story that can explain the rise of many agricultural controversies.”

With this established, they take on issues such as pesticides, fertilizers, carbon footprints, GMOs, farm subsidies, local food, and animal welfare.

Although the authors seem to be struggling to be fair to the positions of “liberal activists,” they tend to judge those positions as overly simplistic.

In the view of this liberal activist (I prefer advocate, however), this book ends up reflecting the authors’ strong ties to—and defense of—industrial agricultural models.

This is a good place to start to understand the non-liberal activist perspective.

Paul Thompson.  From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone.  Oxford University Press, 2015.

I was pleased to be asked to blurb this one:

From Field to Fork makes it clear that every food choice has ethical implications and that sorting out these implications from the science and politics of food is anything but simple.   The ethical issues discussed in this book are fascinatingly complex and deserve the serious debates they are sure to stimulate.  If ever a book provided food for thought, it’s this one.