Convincing, often enraging, and no more optimistic than the facts call for.
A new exposé of the American meat industry.
Since Upton Sinclair’s 1906 bestseller, The Jungle, denunciations of the meat industry appear regularly, and they remain fully justified. A simple description of what happens when an animal enters a slaughterhouse will horrify most readers, and equally time-honored are journalists’ depictions of low-wage slaughterhouse work, which is gruesome, dangerous, and unhealthy. Sorvino, who runs the coverage of food, drink, and agriculture at Forbes, does not ignore these easy marks, but she aims higher, targeting multinational corporations, billionaires, global trade, climate change, soil destruction, and pollution. “Meat production has been a staple of the American economy, culture, and diet for generations,” she writes, “but industrial agriculture that values profits over people and the environment is careening toward a food-insecure future.” American farmers and meat processors benefit from government subsidies and tax breaks, but their profits are a result of their cruel, assembly-line efficiency in factory farms or titanic feedlots, where the animals consume hyperdense feed, chemicals, and antibiotics to boost their weight before slaughter. Research reveals strong evidence that processed food, including bacon, ham, hot dogs, and salami, can cause cancer. Readers will gnash their teeth at Sorvino’s vivid accounts of rapacious billionaires and the half-dozen mega-corporations that dominate the industry, pollute waterways, and exhaust farmland under the very gentle hand of government regulators. In the final section, the author explores a few solutions, but she is skeptical that alternative protein will ever upend traditional industrial systems. She describes a dozen entrepreneurs and their protein alternatives, but “meat alternatives accounted for 0.2 percent of 2020 grocery meat sales.” Money is rarely their main problem because this is a trendy field for venture capitalists (even the industry giants are researching this area), but investors nearly always value profit over saving the environment, and many of their products are far from organic, requiring industrial farmed inputs, chemicals, and pesticides.
Convincing, often enraging, and no more optimistic than the facts call for.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982172-04-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!
It should come as no surprise that the gifted author of The Sea Around Usand its successors can take another branch of science—that phase of biology indicated by the term ecology—and bring it so sharply into focus that any intelligent layman can understand what she is talking about.
Understand, yes, and shudder, for she has drawn a living portrait of what is happening to this balance nature has decreed in the science of life—and what man is doing (and has done) to destroy it and create a science of death. Death to our birds, to fish, to wild creatures of the woods—and, to a degree as yet undetermined, to man himself. World War II hastened the program by releasing lethal chemicals for destruction of insects that threatened man’s health and comfort, vegetation that needed quick disposal. The war against insects had been under way before, but the methods were relatively harmless to other than the insects under attack; the products non-chemical, sometimes even introduction of other insects, enemies of the ones under attack. But with chemicals—increasingly stronger, more potent, more varied, more dangerous—new chain reactions have set in. And ironically, the insects are winning the war, setting up immunities, and re-emerging, their natural enemies destroyed. The peril does not stop here. Waters, even to the underground water tables, are contaminated; soils are poisoned. The birds consume the poisons in their insect and earthworm diet; the cattle, in their fodder; the fish, in the waters and the food those waters provide. And humans? They drink the milk, eat the vegetables, the fish, the poultry. There is enough evidence to point to the far-reaching effects; but this is only the beginning,—in cancer, in liver disorders, in radiation perils…This is the horrifying story. It needed to be told—and by a scientist with a rare gift of communication and an overwhelming sense of responsibility. Already the articles taken from the book for publication in The New Yorkerare being widely discussed. Book-of-the-Month distribution in October will spread the message yet more widely.
The book is not entirely negative; final chapters indicate roads of reversal, before it is too late!Pub Date: Sept. 27, 1962
ISBN: 061825305X
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1962
APPRECIATIONS
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