Book description
A prominent food journalist follows the trail from Big Pizza to
square tomatoes to exploding food prices to Wall Street, trying figure
out why we can't all have healthy, delicious, affordable food
In 2008, farmers grew enough to feed twice the world's population,
yet more people starved than ever beforeÂ-and most of them were
farmers. In Bet the Farm, food writer Kaufman sets out to
discover the connection between the global food system and why the
food on our tables is getting less healthy and less delicious even as
the the world's biggest food companies and food scientists say things
are better than ever. To unravel this riddle, he moves down the supply
chain like a detective solving a mystery, revealing a force at work
that is larger than Monsanto, McDonalds or any of the other commonly
cited culpritsÂ-and far more shocking.
Kaufman's recent cover story for Harper's, "The Food
Bubble," provoked controversy throughout the food world, and led
to appearances on the NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, Fox Business News,
Democracy Now, and Bloomberg TV, along with features on National
Public Radio and the BBC World Service.
- Visits the front lines of the food supply system and food
politics as Kaufman visits farms, food science research labs,
agribusiness giants, the United Nations, the Chicago Mercantile
Exchange, and more
- Explains how food has been financialized and the powerful
consequences of this change, including: the Arab Spring, started
over rising food prices; farmers being put out of business; food
scientists rushing to make easy-to-transport, homogenized
ingredients instead of delicious foods
- Explains how the push for sustainability in food production is
more likely to make everything worse, rather than betterÂ-and how
the rise of fast food is bad for us, but catastrophic for those
who will never even see a McNugget or frozen pizza
FREDERICK KAUFMAN is a contributing editor at Harper's
and teaches at the City University of New York's Graduate School of
Journalism. He has written about American food culture for Foreign
Policy, Wired, the New Yorker, Gourmet, the
New York Times Magazine, and others. He has spoken about food
justice and food politics at the General Assembly of the UN and
appeared on MSNBC, Fox Business News, Democracy Now!, and
public radio's Radiolab, On the Media, and the BBC World Service.
