Synopses & Reviews
As mad cow disease hits hard in the United States and bird flu roils the Asian poultry markets, the issue of food safety has never been more stark. According to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 75 million Americans fell sick last year from the food they ate. Christopher D. Cook's riveting and timely investigation takes us beyond
Fast Food Nation to explain why our entire food system is in crisis. Corporate consolidation of farms and supermarkets, high-tech drives to increase productivity, misplaced subsidies for exports, and inadequate regulation have all combined to produce a grim harvest. In these pages we encounter fruit and vegetables laminated by crop spray, slaughterhouses that transport illegal immigrants to the United States to butcher diseased meat for less than the minimum wage, and the near-extinction of American family farms.
Yet, Cook argues, there is another way: Sales of organic food nearly tripled to $13 billion in 2001-2002. Farmers' markets and food cooperatives are burgeoning across the nation, and the slow food and food justice movements have become part of the mainstream. The eloquence and concision of Diet for a Dead Planet will spur the campaign still further.
- Food-borne pathogens cause up to 30 million human illnesses, and as many as 9,000 deaths, in the U.S. each year
- Agriculture dumps nearly 500,000 tons of pesticides many of them known carcinogens on our food each year
- American farms produce more than 1.3 billion tons of animal waste annually 5 tons for every U.S. citizen
- For every dollar consumers spend on food, 81 cents goes on marketing with just 19 cents to the farmer
- Farm subsidies in the United States and European Union total nearly half a billion dollars a day
- The average food item in the United States travels 2,000 miles from farm to table
Review
"Stands in the classic American tradition of muckraking journalism. Cook offers an extensive and frightening catalog of the perils in our food supply." San Diego Union-Tribune
Review
"A far-reaching takedown of the American food industry...further explores the stomach-churning realm described by Eric Schlosser." Mother Jones
Review
"A book that forces you to look at things that you took for granted. Like breakfast." Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Review
"Provides the big picture, along with fascinating details, to motivate change before it's too late." Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet
Review
"A powerful and provocative indictment of the food industry. If you eat, read this important book! " Jim Hightower, author of Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush
Review
"Christopher Cook helps us rethink the very ethical and environmental principles that ought to guide our approach to food. In short, Cook is imploring us to think more deeply about our most basic connections to the earth. He raises the big questions and steers us to some possible answers." Jeremy Rifkin, President, Foundation on Economic Trends
Review
"I have worked with hundreds of journalists, and Chris is quite simply one of the very best...he has a keen sense of how economics and politics interact to shape the world we live in." Eric Bates, Rolling Stone
Synopsis
This absorbing study looks at the dangers of American food production, including exposure of food to food-borne pathogens, pesticides, and much more.
Synopsis
If we are what we eat, then, as Christopher D. Cook contends in this powerful look at the food industry, we are not in good shape. The facts speak for themselves: more than 75 million Americans suffered from food poisoning last year, and 5,000 of them died; 67 percent of American males are overweight, obesity is the second leading cause of preventable death in the United States and supersizing is just the tip of the iceberg: the way we make and eat food today is putting our environment and the very future of food at risk.
Diet for a Dead Planet, now available in paperback, takes us beyond Fast Food Nation to show how our entire food system is in crisis. Corporate control of farms and supermarkets, unsustainable drives to increase agribusiness productivity and profits, misplaced subsidies for exports, and anemic regulation have all combined to produce a grim harvest. Food, our most basic necessity, has become a force behind a staggering array of social, economic, and environmental epidemics.
Yet there is another way. Cook argues cogently for a whole new way of looking at what we eat one that places healthy, sustainably produced food at the top of the menu for change. In the words of Jim Hightower, "If you eat, read this important book!"
About the Author
Christopher D. Cook is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work has appeared in Harper's, Mother Jones, the Christian Science Monitor, the Nation, and the Economist. He lives in San Francisco.