About food instead of crops for a change...

The Politics on Our Plates


A Review in Chronicle of Higher Education By AMY BENTLEY

Few would argue with the premise that food has taken on new importance in the United States in recent years. Cities are banning foie gras and considering whether restaurants should eliminate most trans fats from their menus, and schools are debating the merits of creating "junk-food-free zones" to encourage healthy eating. Experts declare the United States a "toxic food environment" and, taking cues from battles over smoking, seek to establish a "fat tax" on high-calorie, unnutritious foods. Many are wringing their hands over what they see as the extinction of family meals and the disappearance of home cooking...

The current interest in food has historical roots that reach back centuries, as Warren J. Belasco describes in his book Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food. However, in the last 30 years or so in the United States, we've witnessed an emerging food "revolution" that has attempted to counter (or at least circumvent) the worst aspects of the industrialization of food. Those involved have worked to demonstrate the connection between good food and sustainable agricultural practices and to create better-tasting, higher-quality food for restaurants and consumption at home. Within the last decade, scholarly and political attention to food matters has deepened as the field of food studies has emerged, and as popular books by Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Marion Nestle (Food Politics and Safe Food) exposed to an interested public the questionable practices of the food industry and the government's willingness to accommodate food-industry demands. It's easy to understand why books about food sell — food matters, and people are rarely neutral about the subject...


Go to The Chronicle of Higher Education for the full read.

BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY

Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany, by Bill Buford (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)

Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food, by Warren J. Belasco (University of California Press, 2006)

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan (The Penguin Press, 2006)

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, by Peter Singer and Jim Mason (Rodale Press, 2006)

What to Eat, by Marion Nestle (North Point Press, 2006)