I'm speeding along reading a book I have for just two weeks, wondering why with all the foodies in this county my library didn't have a copy of it.
It's Food Wars: the Global Battle for Mouths, Minds and Markets by Tim Lang and Michael Heasman. (London: Earthscan, 2004) It is a global book, much less US centered than most of the other reading I have recommended. There are lots of charts and graphs and tables here, which I like a lot. But most significant is that this book does not mince words about the tensions between human health and nutrition values and ecological values. This is a tension I feel a lot when I meet with food system folks around here - I came close to a shouting match with a woman who felt it was more important for folks to have fresh produce, even if it does come from Mexico. I was arguing for sustainability values. It's not that I don't care about health - but that I see the values as nesting. Unless we look at planetary health, our solutions to individual health will be for one generation at most.
One of the tables toward the end of the book is "some tentative rules for food and ecological health (adults)". I love the last bullet
- Enjoy food in the short term, but think about its impact long term
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