Food Industry

The New York Times best-selling author of Fat Chance explains the eight pathologies that underlie all chronic disease, documents how processed food has impacted them to ruin our health, economy, and environment over the past 50 years, and proposes an urgent manifesto and strategy to cure both us and the planet.

Barons is the story of seven corporate titans, their rise to power, and the consequences for everyone else. Take Mike McCloskey, chairman of Fair Oaks Farms. In a few short decades, he went from managing a modest dairy herd to running the Disneyland of agriculture. Mike benefited from deregulation of the American food industry, a phenomenon that has consolidated wealth in the hands of select tycoons, and along the way, hollowed out the nation's rural towns and local businesses.

An accessible and balanced account, Food Politics laid the groundwork for today's food revolution and changed the way we respond to food industry marketing practices. Now, a new introduction and concluding chapter bring us up to date on the key events in that movement. This pathbreaking, prize-winning book helps us understand more clearly than ever before what we eat and why. This book is published by University of California Press.

There's so much confusion about what to eat. Are you jumping from diet to diet and nothing seems to work? Are you sick of seeing contradictory health advice from experts? Just like the tobacco industry lied to us about the dangers of cigarettes, the same untruths, cover-ups, and deceptive practices are occurring in the food industry. Vani Hari, a.k.a. The Food Babe, blows the lid off the lies we've been fed about the food we eat - lies about its nutrient value, effects on our health, label information, and even the very science we base our food choices on.

Jane Philpott has spent her life learning what makes people sick and what keeps people well. She has witnessed miracles in modern medicine. She has also watched children die of starvation in a world that has plenty of food. With Health for All, she sounds a clarion call for a radical disruption in a health care system that is broken—but not beyond repair. The vision is rooted in a deep-seated commitment to health equity.

This book exposes an industrial system of food production geared not to produce nourishing food, but to produce maximum profit for corporations. It is based on hard scientific research, most of which has been conducted outside of the United States, where food production lobbies have fought against this kind of research.

What's really going into commercial dog food? The answer is horrifying. Big Kibble is big business: $75 billion globally. A handful of multinational corporations dominate the industry and together own as many as 80 percent of all brands. This comes as a surprise to most people, but what’s even more shocking is how lax the regulations and guidelines are around these products. The guidelines - or lack thereof - for pet food allow producers to include ever-cheaper ingredients and create ever-larger earnings.

Medicine has become inhuman, to disastrous effect. The doctor-patient relationship - the heart of medicine - is broken: doctors are too distracted and overwhelmed to truly connect with their patients, and medical errors and misdiagnoses abound. In Deep Medicine, leading physician Eric Topol reveals how artificial intelligence can help. AI has the potential to transform everything doctors do, from notetaking and medical scans to diagnosis and treatment, greatly cutting down the cost of medicine and reducing human mortality.

Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. The numbers are stark: Of the roughly 6,000 different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these - rice, wheat, and corn - now provide 50 percent of all our calories. Dig deeper and the trends are more worrisome still.

In the US, there is a wide-ranging network of at least 370 food banks, and more than 60,000 hunger-relief organizations such as food pantries and meal programs. And yet hunger still affects one in nine Americans. What are we doing wrong? In Reinventing Food Banks and Pantries, Katie Martin argues that if handing out more and more food was the answer, we would have solved the problem of hunger decades ago. Martin instead presents a new model for charitable food, one where success is measured not by pounds of food distributed but by lives changed.

Rose George, acclaimed chronicler of what we would rather ignore, sails from Rotterdam to Suez to Singapore on ships the length of football fields and the height of Niagara Falls; she patrols the Indian Ocean with an anti-piracy task force; she joins seafaring chaplains and investigates the harm that ships inflict on endangered whales. Sharply informative and entertaining, Ninety Percent of Everything reveals the workings and perils of an unseen world that holds the key to our economy, our environment, and our very civilization.

Is Organic Worth the Price?

$8 for organic milk. Sure, you could spend half as much, but it’s worth it to know that you’re supporting a small family farm where the cows can munch on green grass all day. Plus, you’re not drinking nasty hormones and chemicals, and you’re doing your part to save the environment. Seems like you’re winning all around, but what would you do if that picture of the happy farm, the personal health, and the clean air and water turned out not to be so pretty? What if organic isn't all it's hyped up to be?

What if organic produce only had marginally less pesticide residues than conventional produce? What if the organic, grass-fed beef cows ended up on the very same feedlots as factory-farmed, grain-fed beef cows? What if large swaths of the country were being taken over by huge corporate-owned farming operations, organic farming operations that were destroying the landscape and depleting the soil? Organic is much more complicated than we’ve been led to believe. From the scale to the possible health implications of pesticides to the treatment of animals, it’s not a black and white issue.

Natural Deception takes a sobering look at one of the fastest growing industries in the world today. We find that organic may be one more buzz phrase used to sell products rather than a movement really concerned for the wellbeing of our planet and its inhabitants. In the spirit of an undercover news reporter, author Joey Lott takes us through the organic food industry point by point, examining our assumptions and revealing the truth. Find out what major corporation owns your favorite small organic brand. Examine whether pesticides may be a health detriment or even partially beneficial.

Years of consolidation, price-fixing, and power grabs by elite industry insiders have harmed consumers and caused environmental destruction. And while that’s hurting us, it’s also making others rich. Now, financial journalist Chloe Sorvino presents a “deeply informed and eye-opening” (Publishers Weekly) look at the meat industry and its future as its fundamental weaknesses are laid bare for all to see.

Ron Shaich is a business visionary who has been part of building three iconic restaurant brands: Au Bon Pain, Panera Bread, and now Cava. Along the way, he developed "fast casual," a $100 billion-plus segment of the industry. Now he reveals what he learned about entrepreneurship, running large enterprises, business transformation, and life itself. He illustrates these lessons with his experiences turning a small cookie store into 2,400 restaurants with $5 billion in revenue, delivering annual investor returns of 25% over two decades, and outperforming both Starbucks and Chipotle.

There is a major disconnect between what we wear and our knowledge of its impact on land, air, water, labor, and human health. Even those who value access to safe, local, nutritious food have largely overlooked the production of fiber, dyes, and the chemistry that forms the backbone of modern textile production. While humans are 100 percent reliant on their second skin, it’s common to think little about the biological and human cultural context from which our clothing derives.

Cannabis for Dummies presents the science behind the use of this amazingly therapeutic plant. In this book, you'll find the hands-on knowledge and education you need to make an informed decision about your cannabis purchase, as a patient and a consumer.

To a degree both engrossing and alarming, the story of fast food is the story of postwar America. Fast Food Nation is a groundbreaking work of investigation and cultural history that may change the way America thinks about the way it eats.

In Kid Food, nationally recognized writer and food advocate Bettina Elias Siegel explores one of the fundamental challenges of modern parenting: trying to raise healthy eaters in a society intent on pushing children in the opposite direction. Siegel dives deep into the many influences that make feeding children healthfully so difficult - from the prevailing belief that kids will only eat highly processed "kid food" to the near-constant barrage of "special treats".

Millions of us use restrictive diets, intermittent fasting, IV therapies, and Ozempic abuse to shrink until we are sample-size acceptable. But for the 30 million Americans who live with eating disorders, it isn’t just about less. More, Please is a chronicle of a lifelong fixation with food—its power to soothe, to comfort, to offer a fleeting escape from the outside world—as well as an examination of the ways in which compulsory thinness, diet culture, and the seductive promise of “wellness” have resulted in warping countless Americans’ relationship with healthy eating.

How we choose which foods to eat is growing more complicated by the day, and the straightforward, practical approach of What to Eat has been praised as welcome relief. As Nestle takes us through each supermarket section - produce, dairy, meat, fish - she explains the issues, cutting through foodie jargon and complicated nutrition labels and debunking the misleading health claims made by big food companies. With Nestle as our guide, we are shown how to make wise food choices - and are inspired to eat sensibly and nutritiously.