Staff Picks Reading List
Looking to learn more about regenerative farming, food systems, or food justice this summer? Check out this reading list compiled of staff picks and favorites!
Silent Spring
Rachel Carlson, Julian Huxley, and Linda J. Lear
Source: Google Books
Now recognized as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, Silent Spring exposed the destruction of wildlife through the widespread use of pesticides. Despite condemnation in the press and heavy-handed attempts by the chemical industry to ban the book, Rachel Carson succeeded in creating a new public awareness of the environment which led to changes in government and inspired the ecological movement.
Source: Penguin Books
The New American Farmer
Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern
Source: Google Books
Although the majority of farms in the United States have US-born owners who identify as white, a growing number of new farmers are immigrants, many of them from Mexico, who originally came to the United States looking for work in agriculture. In The New American Farmer, Laura-Anne Minkoff-Zern explores the experiences of Latino/a immigrant farmers as they transition from farmworkers to farm owners, offering a new perspective on racial inequity and sustainable farming.
Source: MIT Press
The Cooking Gene
Michael W. Twitty
Source: Google Books
A renowned culinary historian offers a fresh perspective on our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry—both black and white—through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom.
Source: HarperCollins Publishers
Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food
Paul Greenberg
Source: Google Books
Investigating the forces that get fish to our dinner tables, Greenberg reveals our damaged relationship with the ocean and its inhabitants. Just three decades ago, nearly everything we ate from the sea was wild. Today, rampant overfishing and an unprecedented biotech revolution have brought us to a point where wild and farmed fish occupy equal parts of a complex marketplace.
Four Fish offers a way for us to move toward a future in which healthy and sustainable seafood is the rule rather than the exception.
Source: Penguin Publishing Group
The Third Plate
Dan Barber
Source: Google Books
Today's optimistic farm-to-table food culture has a dark secret: the local food movement has failed to change how we eat. It has also offered a false promise for the future of food. In his visionary New York Times-bestselling book, chef Dan Barber offers a radical new way of thinking about food that will heal the land and taste good, too. Looking to the detrimental cooking of our past, and the misguided dining of our present, Barber points to a future "third plate": a new form of American eating where good farming and good food intersect. Barber's The Third Plate charts a bright path forward for eaters and chefs alike, daring everyone to imagine a future for our national cuisine that is as sustainable as it is delicious.
Source: Penguin Press
Perilous Bounty
Tom Philpott
Source: Google Books
More than a decade after Michael Pollan's game-changing The Omnivore's Dilemma transformed the conversation about what we eat, a combination of global diet trends and corporate interests have put American agriculture into a state of "quiet emergency," from dangerous drought in California--which grows more than 50 percent of the fruits and vegetables we eat--to catastrophic topsoil loss in the "breadbasket" heartland of the United States. Whether or not we take heed, these urgent crises of industrial agriculture will define our future.
Source: Bloomsbury Publishing
Happy reading!
