Three more food policy books to feast on

Before I get started this week, a quick reminder that we will be holding a live conversation with May’s authors of the month, Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg, this coming Wednesday May 27 at 3pm Eastern/12pm Pacific. I’ll send out calendar invites to paying club members, and a link will go around via email the day before.

But if you can make it, please join us. These chats are a special part of the Curious Reading Club experience, and we don’t always get to do them. And, if you can’t be there but have questions, then please send them over via email and I’ll make sure to interrogate them accordingly. I’d love for you to make the most of it.

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OK, admission time: because I am a gigantic cliche of a man, the first thing that drew me to Feed the People! was its cover. I had popped into one of my local bookstores (Dog Eared Books on San Francisco’s Valencia Street) and since I was feeling indecisive, I decided to start by judging the books on sale by looking for the most attractive book among the dustjackets that festooned the room. And I was immediately pulled toward this kind of retro, Warhol-esque can illustration, placed on top of a saturated, electrifying blue. It had a magnetic quality. 

In truth, though, it was more than just the cover that got me in the end. A beautiful, striking-looking book about, say, fly fishing, would probably only have dragged my attention to it for a second or two. But I find food—the history of it, our relationship with it, the systems that bring it to us—an endlessly fascinating topic. So the cover was the hook, and the content was what caught me. 

Looking back over my reading history (everyone keeps a list of all the books they’ve worked through, right?) I can see that food is a remarkably common thread in my reading. But it has only popped up once before, really, for Curious Reading Club. Back in September 2024, our pick of the month was Nicola Twilley’s fantastic Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. Perhaps the biggest surprise, then, is that I hadn’t picked Feed the People! or some other food-related title earlier.

What that does mean, though, is that I have some recommendations to give. So if you are interested in the kind of ideas and stories that this month’s book explores, here are a few other titles I suggest you might find worthwhile. They don’t all agree, but they do wrangle intelligently with similar topics.

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One absolutely eye-opening book for me was Raj Patel’s 2008 classic Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. This book tackles one of the great contradictions of the 21st century: that there is so much food in the world and yet so many people who cannot get enough. Why should anybody starve, ever? You may have heard the old William Gibson line: “the future’s here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” The truth is that the present is here, but whether you have access to it is largely dependent on where you sit in the global economic order.

Tom Philpott’s Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It (2020) looks at the perils of industrial farming, even if he is much more fond of the Wendell Berry/Michael Pollan school of small-scale farming than Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg are. But his reporting reads true, leans on his own experiences as a farm, and features some compelling on-the-ground storytelling. 

Talking of industrialization, I wanted to draw your attention to Maryn McKenna’s Plucked: Chicken, Antibiotics, and How Big Business Changed the Way the World Eats. I preferred this book’s previous title, Big Chicken, which I thought was both funnier and a little more cutting… but this is a great book on the ways in which the food system gets perverted.

Feed the People! explored a little of the way in which chicken has unexpectedly become one of the world’s staple proteins, but McKenna goes all in on poultry to showcase the real downsides of that explosive growth. She covers it all: the terror of monocultures, the horror of factory farming, and the anxiety we should all feel about the vulnerabilities that it all causes. Worth your time. 

I hope to see some of you on Wednesday, but until next time,

Onward

Bobbie