What does it take to run the American supermarket? How do products get to shelves? Who sets the price? And who suffers the consequences of increased convenience and efficiency? In this exposé, author Benjamin Lorr pulls back the curtain on this highly secretive industry. Combining deep sourcing and immersive reporting, Lorr leads a wild investigation in which we learn the secrets of Trader Joe's success from Trader Joe himself, why truckers call their job "sharecropping on wheels," what it takes for a product to earn certification labels like "organic" and "fair trade," the struggles entrepreneurs face as they fight for shelf space, including essential tips, tricks, and traps for any new food business, the truth behind the alarming slave trade in the shrimp industry and much more.

    The World According to Monsanto tells the little-known yet shocking story of this agribusiness giant--the world's leading producer of GMOs (genetically modified organisms)--and how its new "green" face is no less troubling than its PCB (and Agent Orange) -soaked past.Robin reports that, following its long history of manufacturing hazardous chemicals and lethal herbicides, Monsanto is now marketing itself as a "life sciences" company, seemingly convinced about the virtues of sustainable development. However, Monsanto now controls the majority of the yield of the world's genetically modified corn and soy, ingredients found in more than 95 percent of American households, and its alarming legal and political tactics to maintain this monopoly are the subject of worldwide concern.Released to great acclaim and controversy in France, throughout Europe, and in Latin America, The World According to Monsanto is sure to change the way we think about food safety and the corporate control of our food supply.

    An Edible History of Humanity is a pithy, entertaining account of how a series of changes—caused, enabled, or influenced by food—has helped to shape and transform societies around the world. The first civilizations were built on barley and wheat in the Near East, millet and rice in Asia, and corn and potatoes in the Americas. Why farming created a strictly ordered social hierarchy in contrast to the loose egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers is, as Tom Standage reveals, as interesting as the details of the complex cultures that emerged, eventually interconnected by commerce. Trade in exotic spices in particular spawned the age of exploration and the colonization of the New World. Food's influence over the course of history has been just as prevalent in modern times. In the late eighteenth century, Britain's solution to food shortages was to industrialize and import food rather than grow it. Food helped to determine the outcome of wars: Napoleon's rise and fall was intimately connected with his ability to feed his vast armies. In the twentieth century, Communist leaders employed food as an ideological weapon, resulting in the death by starvation of millions in the Soviet Union and China. And today the foods we choose in the supermarket connect us to global debates about trade, development, the environment, and the adoption of new technologies. Encompassing many fields, from genetics and archaeology to anthropology and economics—and invoking food as a special form of technology—An Edible History of Humanity is a fully satisfying discourse on the sweep of human history.

    Not to mention the vacations that had to be planned around the harvest, the near electrocution of the tree man, the limitations of his own middle-aged body, and the pity of his wife and kids. When Alexander runs (just for fun!) a costbenefit analysis, adding up everything from the live animal trap to the Velcro tomato wraps and then amortizing it over the life of his garden, it comes as quite a shock to learn that it cost him a staggering $64 to grow each one of his beloved Brandywine tomatoes. But as any gardener will tell you, you can't put a price on the unparalleled pleasures of providing fresh food for your family.

    Rick Hammond grew up on a farm, and for forty years he has raised cattle and crops on his wife’s fifth-generation homestead in Nebraska, in hopes of passing it on to their four children. But as the handoff nears, their family farm—and their entire way of life—are under siege on many fronts, from shifting trade policies, to encroaching pipelines, to climate change. Following the Hammonds from harvest to harvest, Ted Genoways explores the rapidly changing world of small, traditional farming operations. He creates a vivid, nuanced portrait of a radical new landscape and one family’s fight to preserve their legacy and the life they love.

    Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money brings a different visionaa meta-economic vision, looking above the top tine and below the bottom line, a new way of seeing what is going on in the soil of the economy.The soil of the economy? Bringing money back down to earth?This is the path towards a financial system that serves people and place as much at it serves industry sectors and markets. To discover this path, and to begin to walk down it, is the mission of Slow Money.This mission emerges from decades of work as a venture capitalist, foundation treasurer, and entrepreneur by Woody Tasch, whose explorations shed new light on a truer, more beautiful, more prudent kind of fiduciary responsibility, a fiduciary responsibility that is not stuck in the industrial concepts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but which reflects the new economic, social and environmental realities of the 21st century.These explorations take us from the jokes of his father to the insights of his son, from the Board rooms of foundations and start-up companies to the farm fields of Vermont, from gopher holes in New Mexico to the possibilities of an alternative stock exchange, from Carlo Petrini to Muhammad Yunus, from Thoreau to Soros.Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money investigates an essential new strategy for investing in local food systems, and introduces a group of fiduciary activists who are exploring what should come after industrial finance and industrial agriculture. Theirs is a vision for investing that puts soil fertility into return-on-investment calculations.Could there ever be an alternative stock exchange dedicated to slow, small, and local?Could a million American families get their food from CSAs?What if you had to invest 50 percent of your assets within 50 miles of where you live?Such questionsaat the heart of Slow Moneyaare the first step on our path to a new economy and a new culture. Inquiries into Slow Money is a call to action for designing capital markets built aroundanot extraction and consumption butapreservation and restoration.Is it a movement or is it an investment strategy? Yes.

    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 culprits—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 moreExplains 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 foodsExplains how the push for sustainability in food production is more likely to make everything worse, rather than better—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

    What ensues—through hilarious encounters with all manner of livestock and colorful local characters—is a crash course in sustainable agriculture. Pritchard’s biggest ally is his renegade father, who initially questions his son’s career choice and eschews organic foods for sugary mainstream fare. But just when the farm starts to turn heads at local markets, his father’s health takes a turn for the worse. With poetry and humor, this timely memoir tugs on the heartstrings and feeds the soul long after the last page is turned.

    He visits Norwegian megafarms that use genetic techniques once pioneered on sheep to grow millions of pounds of salmon a year. He travels to the ancestral river of the Yupik Eskimos to see the only Fair Trade–certified fishing company in the world. He makes clear how PCBs and mercury find their way into seafood; discovers how Mediterranean sea bass went global; challenges the author of Cod to taste the difference between a farmed and a wild cod; and almost sinks to the bottom of the South Pacific while searching for an alternative to endangered bluefin tuna.Fish, Greenberg reveals, are the last truly wild food — for now. By examining the forces that get fish to our dinner tables, he shows how we can start to heal the oceans and fight for a world where healthy and sustainable seafood is the rule rather than the exception.

    What have I sprinkled on my backyard? Is somebody using my home, my food, to recycle toxic waste? It seems unbelievable, outlandish -- but what if it's true? A riveting exposé, Fateful Harvest tells the story of Patty Martin -- the mayor of a small Washington town called Quincy -- who discovers American industries are dumping toxic waste into farmers' fields and home gardens by labeling it "fertilizer." She becomes outraged at the failed crops, sick horses, and rare diseases in her town, as well as the threats to her children's health. Yet, when she blows the whistle on a nationwide problem, Patty Martin is nearly run out of town.Duff Wilson, whose Seattle Times series on this story was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, provides the definitive account of a new and alarming environmental scandal. Fateful Harvest is a gripping study of corruption and courage, of recklessness and reckoning. It is a story that speaks to the greatest fears -- and ultimate hope -- in us all.

    David Owen traces all that water from the Colorado's headwaters to its parched terminus, once a verdant wetland but now a million-acre desert. He takes readers on an adventure downriver, along a labyrinth of waterways, reservoirs, power plants, farms, fracking sites, ghost towns, and RV parks, to the spot near the U.S.–Mexico border where the river runs dry. Water problems in the western United States can seem tantalizingly easy to solve: just turn off the fountains at the Bellagio, stop selling hay to China, ban golf, cut down the almond trees, and kill all the lawyers. But a closer look reveals a vast man-made ecosystem that is far more complex and more interesting than the headlines let on.The story Owen tells in Where the Water Goes is crucial to our future: how a patchwork of engineering marvels, byzantine legal agreements, aging infrastructure, and neighborly cooperation enables life to flourish in the desert, and the disastrous consequences we face when any part of this tenuous system fails.

    Cook contends in this powerful look at the food industry, we are not in good shape. The facts speak for themselves: more than 75 million Americans suffered from food poisoning last year, and 5,000 of them died; 67 percent of American males are overweight, obesity is the second leading cause of preventable death in the United States and supersizing is just the tip of the iceberg: the way we make and eat food today is putting our environment and the very future of food at risk.Diet for a Dead Planet takes us beyond Fast Food Nation to show how our entire food system is in crisis. Corporate control of farms and supermarkets, unsustainable drives to increase agribusiness productivity and profits, misplaced subsidies for exports, and anemic regulation have all combined to produce a grim harvest. Food, our most basic necessity, has become a force behind a staggering array of social, economic, and environmental epidemics.Yet there is another way. Cook argues cogently for a whole new way of looking at what we eat—one that places healthy, sustainably produced food at the top of the menu for change. In the words of Jim Hightower, “If you eat, read this important book!”

    The journey is scary, exciting, and, ultimately, encouraging."--Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth ExtinctionClimate models show that global crop production will decline every decade for the rest of this century due to drought, heat, and flooding. Water supplies are in jeopardy. Meanwhile, the world's population is expected to grow another 30 percent by midcentury. So how, really, will we feed nine billion people sustainably in the coming decades?Amanda Little, a professor at Vanderbilt University and an award-winning journalist, spent three years traveling through a dozen countries and as many U.S. states in search of answers to this question. Her journey took her from an apple orchard in Wisconsin to a remote control organic farm in Shanghai, from Norwegian fish farms to famine-stricken regions of Ethiopia.The race to reinvent the global food system is on, and the challenge is twofold: We must solve the existing problems of industrial agriculture while also preparing for the pressures ahead. Through her interviews and adventures with farmers, scientists, activists, and engineers, Little tells the fascinating story of human innovation and explores new and old approaches to food production while charting the growth of a movement that could redefine sustainable food on a grand scale. She meets small permaculture farmers and "Big Food" executives, botanists studying ancient superfoods and Kenyan farmers growing the country's first GMO corn. She travels to places that might seem irrelevant to the future of food yet surprisingly play a critical role--a California sewage plant, a U.S. Army research lab, even the inside of a monsoon cloud above Mumbai. Little asks tough questions: Can GMOs actually be good for the environment--and for us? Are we facing the end of animal meat? What will it take to eliminate harmful chemicals from farming? How can a clean, climate-resilient food supply become accessible to all?Throughout her journey, Little finds and shares a deeper understanding of the threats of climate change and encounters a sense of awe and optimism about the lessons of our past and the scope of human ingenuity.

    But we should--even those of us who take care of our business in pristine, sanitary conditions. For it's not only in developing countries that human waste is a major public health threat: population growth is taxing even the most advanced sewage systems, and the disease spread by waste kills more people worldwide every year than any other single cause of death. Even in America, 1.95 million people have no access to an indoor toilet. Yet the subject remains unmentionable."The Big Necessity "takes aim at the taboo, revealing everything that matters about how people do--and don't--deal with their own waste. Moving from the deep underground sewers of Paris, London, and New York--an infrastructure disaster waiting to happen--to an Indian slum where ten toilets are shared by 60,000 people, Rose George stops along the way to explore the potential saviors: China's five million biogas digesters, which produce energy from waste; the heroes of third world sanitation movements; the inventor of the humble Car Loo; and the U.S. Army's personal lasers used by soldiers to zap their feces in the field.With razor-sharp wit and crusading urgency, mixing levity with gravity, Rose George has turned the subject we like to avoid into a cause with the most serious of consequences.

    This is the first book to look at fracking from both economic and environmental perspectives."