An expert’s vigorous argument for systemic food reform.
An urgent call to action from a noted food journalist.
Offering a sweeping history of the ways humans have procured, processed, and consumed food, Bittman focuses on the political, social, cultural, and environmental consequences of the transformation from hunting and gathering to agriculture and of the increased industrialization of the food system. Like authors such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari, Bittman asserts that agriculture “sparked disputes over landownership, water use, and the extraction of resources” and has “driven exploitation and injustice, slavery and war.” Colonial powers forced Indigenous people to farm crops that benefited Europeans, “establishing cash-crop monoculture” for maximum profits. Soil depletion spurred a search for fertilizer, from bird droppings (“guano-mania” raged in 19th-century Europe) to ammonia-based chemicals. Machinery, pesticides, and governmental policies abetted industrialized farming: a “push to grow larger and focus on one crop.” The author decries the wanton creation of “engineered edible substances,” which he urges consumers to resist with their wallets and their votes. “Today,” he writes, “government subsidizes a harmful form of production that produces a harmful form of food and forces it into markets everywhere.” The food industry has no motivation to make major revisions; unlike some observers, Bittman is skeptical that “buying right” will lead to reform. “The system itself needs to be changed, its values and goals challenged and reimagined,” he writes. “We need legislation to support agriculture that stewards the land. We need food processing whose goal is to nourish. And we need an economy that supports people who want to grow and cook food for their communities. Those will come about when citizens organize and force government to do its job. A good diet will follow.” Underscoring the connection among food, human rights, climate change, and justice, the author forcefully urges both personal and societal change—e.g., the Green New Deal. “The choice,” he writes, “is to change the system or suffer catastrophe.”
An expert’s vigorous argument for systemic food reform.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-328-97462-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
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