Book Price Comparisons
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 More corn anyone? This book is an interesting and factual account about the American food system. It is about the prevalence of corn in every thing that we eat. The author's first hand experience gives the book credibility. The book was extremely captivating, I could not put it down.  should be required reading for everyone who eats This book is a detailed, thoughtful discussion of where our food comes from. There is much that I didn't know, or hadn't thought about. To start, it turns out that most of our food comes from corn, in ways that I had hardly imagined. Aside from tracing corn through the foodchain, one can scientifically prove that most of the carbon in our bodies originally came from corn, by measuring the proportion in our bodies of carbon-13, which happens to appear in a higher proportion in corn than in other plants. Producing most of our food from corn might not sound so bad by itself, but it turns out that this is an ecological disaster, for a number of reasons. The most distressing for me is that vast amounts of fossil fuel are consumed to grow corn, to process corn into the food we eat, and to transport the food to us. It is estimated that 10 calories of fossil fuel energy go into 1 calorie of food. It follows, by my back-of-the-envelope calculations, that walking might use more oil than driving the same distance (because of the extra calories burned by walking). However, riding a bicycle still wins. The first part of the book devastatingly skewers our industrial food system, which has created this and many other unnecessary problems. For example, in the past cows and corn would grow on the same farm, and cow manure would fertilize the corn. Now cows are rasied far away from where the corn is grown; oil has to be consumed to make fertilizer for the corn, and the cow manure presents a waste disposal problem. There are so many other stupid things that you will just have to read the book to find out. After the buzzword "sustainable" is starting to lose its meaning from overuse, the author reminds us: "Unsustainable" means that SOONER OR LATER, IT MUST COLLAPSE. Now I can't walk into a supermarket without being racked with guilt that I am destroying the world, and overcome with despair that most people don't even have a clue about the global consequences of their shopping decisions. Fortunately, there are alternatives. The second part of the book gives a detailed portrait of a model farm in Virginia, which grows different plants and animals which mutually support each other and require hardly any outside resources. This kind of "management intensive" farming is much more difficult than the usual kind, but we are going to have to learn to do this if we don't want to starve in the future. If you want to make a difference, you can start by buying locally grown, minimally processed food as much as possible. The second part of the book also discusses the usual kind of "organic" food, which the author calls "industrial organic". Summary: organic food uses less nasty chemicals than non-organic food, but otherwise has many of the same problems, including heavy use of fossil fuel. Organic food comes with a lot of marketing and story-telling; for example, "free range" chicken is a joke. (The chickens theoretically could go outside into a yard, but everything possible is done to discourage this, so that in practice it never happens.) In the third part of the book, the author discusses his own experience producing a meal more or less entirely from hunting and gathering. Included is an extensive meditation on the ethics of eating animals. In a brilliant piece of rhetoric, the author first presents a compelling case that one should not eat meat, and then subtly demolishes it. Hunting and gathering is not presented as a viable alternative to feeding us (our population is far too large), but rather as an enlightening alternate perspective on our relation to what we eat. In conclusion, given that you eat three or more times a day, you really should read this book (if you are not already familiar with this material) to become more aware of what this eating actually entails. The writing is a bit long-winded and repetetive at times, and the book could probably be edited to about 80 percent of its length without losing much. However it reads quickly. Best of Books This has been a life altering and fascinating read. As I was reading it questions that popped into my head were answered in the proceeding pages. Thinking of picking up one of the latest and greatest diet books? Read this book first, and it should be revealed to you the quality of foods you ingest is what matters most. Fabulously thorough, terrifying and researched book concerning the state of the American food supply. Seems so simple, but it's not Helped me get my head around some things. A good read about what we eat. | |||||||||||||