Find books

Course Textbook

Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know The politics of food is changing fast. In rich countries, obesity is now a more serious problem than hunger. Consumers once satisfied with cheap and convenient food now want food that is also safe, nutritious, fresh, and grown by local farmers using fewer chemicals. Heavily subsidized and under-regulated commercial farmers are facing stronger push back from environmentalists and consumer activists, and food companies are under the microscope. Meanwhile, agricultural success in Asia has spurred income growth and dietary enrichment, but agricultural failure in Africa has left one-third of all citizens undernourished - and the international markets that link these diverse regions together are subject to sudden disruption.The second edition of Food Politics has been thoroughly updated to reflect the latest developments and research on today's global food landscape, including biofuels, the international food market, food aid, obesity, food retailing, urban agriculture, and food safety. The second edition also features an expanded discussion of the links between water, climate change, and food, as well as farming and the environment. New chapters look at livestock, meat and fish and the future of food politics. Paarlberg's book challenges myths and critiques more than a few of today's fashionable beliefs about farming and food. For those ready to have their thinking about food politics informed and also challenged, this is the book to read.

Selected Books

Bringing the Food Economy Home Makes the case, and presents practical proposals, for returning to local food production and marketing.
Eat Local, Taste Global Eat Local, Taste Global: How Ethnocultural Food Reaches Our Tables shows how the demand for ethnocultural vegetables on the part of Toronto's South Asian, Chinese, and Afro-Caribbean Canadians is at odds with the corporate food regime. How does that regime affect the local food movement and ethnic groups' access to their preferred foods? This book addresses that question and suggests that the protection of ethnic and national food security and sovereignty strengthens immigrant integration while producing healthy crossover effects for other Canadians. The authors show how culture, food, and migration are intertwined and how access to ethnocultural vegetables is affected by ethnicity, social class, shopping venues, and food prices. Most ethnic vegetables are imported by corporations and ethnic intermediaries and pass through Toronto's Food Terminal; however, local farmers are now producing some of these vegetables, and alternative forms of agriculture and markets play a significant role in bringing ethnocultural vegetables to our tables. Social justice requires that people have both food security and food sovereignty. Eat Local, Taste Global offers solutions to identified contradictions that include making farmers' markets more inclusive, improving conditions for migrant farm workers, and making alternative forms of agriculture more feasible. This book will be of interest to rural sociologists and political scientists as well as policy-makers, food activists, farmers, and food security organizations.
Food Politics We all witness, in advertising and on supermarket shelves, the fierce competition for our food dollars. In this engrossing exposé, Marion Nestle goes behind the scenes to reveal how the competition really works and how it affects our health. The abundance of food in the United States--enough calories to meet the needs of every man, woman, and child twice over--has a downside. Our over-efficient food industry must do everything possible to persuade people to eat more--more food, more often, and in larger portions--no matter what it does to waistlines or well-being. Like manufacturing cigarettes or building weapons, making food is big business. Food companies in 2000 generated nearly $900 billion in sales. They have stakeholders to please, shareholders to satisfy, and government regulations to deal with. It is nevertheless shocking to learn precisely how food companies lobby officials, co-opt experts, and expand sales by marketing to children, members of minority groups, and people in developing countries. We learn that the food industry plays politics as well as or better than other industries, not least because so much of its activity takes place outside the public view. Editor of the 1988 Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health, Nestle is uniquely qualified to lead us through the maze of food industry interests and influences. She vividly illustrates food politics in action: watered-down government dietary advice, schools pushing soft drinks, diet supplements promoted as if they were First Amendment rights. When it comes to the mass production and consumption of food, strategic decisions are driven by economics--not science, not common sense, and certainly not health. No wonder most of us are thoroughly confused about what to eat to stay healthy. An accessible and balanced account, Food Politics will forever change the way we respond to food industry marketing practices. By explaining how much the food industry influences government nutrition policies and how cleverly it links its interests to those of nutrition experts, this path-breaking book helps us understand more clearly than ever before what we eat and why.
The Global Food Economy The global food economy is riven with contradictions. Rising levels of obesity in the developed world stand in stark contrast to widespread hunger and malnutrition in the global South. Transnational companies dominate the market and benefit from lucrative subsidies, while farmers in developing countries become ever more impoverished. Food miles, mounting toxicity and the 'ecological hoofprint' of livestock have turned agribusiness into one of the leading contributors to climate change, with humanity's food supply resting on ever more precarious foundations. Recent years have seen food riots in over thirty countries, an explosion in biofuels and GM crops, and mounting evidence of a looming environmental catastrophe. In The Global Food Economy Tony Weis explains how such an unequal and unsustainable system was created and how it has been facilitated by governments driven by free market dogma.  Ultimately, Weis looks to how we might build a more socially just, ecologically rational and humane food economy, serving as a timely reminder of why these struggles are so urgent.
The Green Economy and the Water-Energy-Food Nexus This book argues that a variety of policies will be required to create synergies between the water-energy-food nexus sectors while reducing trade-offs in the development of a green economy. Despite rising demand for water, energy and food globally, the governance of water-energy-food sectors has generally remained separate with limited attention placed on the interactions that exist between them. Brears provides readers with a series of in-depth case studies of leading cities, states, nations and regions of differing climates, lifestyles and income-levels from around the world that have implemented a variety of policy innovations to reduce water-energy-food nexus pressures and achieve green growth. The Green Economy and the Water-Energy-Food Nexus will be of interest to town and regional planners, resource conservation managers, policymakers, international companies and organisations interested in reducing water-energy-food nexus pressures, environmental NGOs, researchers, graduate and undergraduate students.