sustainable eating reading list

[memegarden]

Here's a list of the books I've read recently on nutrition, local eating, organic eating, the biology of modern crops & livestock, the detrimental effects of factory farming, etc. This is the order I read them in. I highly recommend all of them, except Gospel of Food, which is merely pretty good, as opposed to shove-it-in-all-my-friends'-faces-

Comments

[xthread]

Although Pollan's level of corporate hostility is off-putting - He's so hostile to corporate ownership of things that I worry that he misses economic calculus like 'you should actually determine whether local food is an environmental win,' and just goes straight for 'if it needs to be shipped or is produced by an organization of more than 25 people, it must be all bad.'

Eating nothing but corn is a bug. But stopping doing so is also pretty straightforward - if you stop buying things made from nothing but corn, then people who sell food will start buying different stuff, and it can trickle back up the chain startlingly fast (IE, legislation to get people to stop doing something heinous can take years even when everyone already agrees that the legislation should exist, but the mix of food products can change in less than a year, because the food system is terrifyingly financially efficient. Low margins focus the mind like you wouldn't believe.

[memegarden]

Yeah, some of those calculations are interesting to look at. When Kingsolver's family decided to eat local for a year, they looked around, decided that eating anything in Arizona was environmentally irresponsible, given the non-renewable nature of the water supply, and moved to Virginia. Nabhan, who is a friend of theirs, made a different decision, and explored traditional desert foods.