An expert’s vigorous argument for systemic food reform.
An urgent call to action from a noted food journalist.
Offering a sweeping history of the ways humans have procured, processed, and consumed food, Bittman focuses on the political, social, cultural, and environmental consequences of the transformation from hunting and gathering to agriculture and of the increased industrialization of the food system. Like authors such as Jared Diamond and Yuval Noah Harari, Bittman asserts that agriculture “sparked disputes over landownership, water use, and the extraction of resources” and has “driven exploitation and injustice, slavery and war.” Colonial powers forced Indigenous people to farm crops that benefited Europeans, “establishing cash-crop monoculture” for maximum profits. Soil depletion spurred a search for fertilizer, from bird droppings (“guano-mania” raged in 19th-century Europe) to ammonia-based chemicals. Machinery, pesticides, and governmental policies abetted industrialized farming: a “push to grow larger and focus on one crop.” The author decries the wanton creation of “engineered edible substances,” which he urges consumers to resist with their wallets and their votes. “Today,” he writes, “government subsidizes a harmful form of production that produces a harmful form of food and forces it into markets everywhere.” The food industry has no motivation to make major revisions; unlike some observers, Bittman is skeptical that “buying right” will lead to reform. “The system itself needs to be changed, its values and goals challenged and reimagined,” he writes. “We need legislation to support agriculture that stewards the land. We need food processing whose goal is to nourish. And we need an economy that supports people who want to grow and cook food for their communities. Those will come about when citizens organize and force government to do its job. A good diet will follow.” Underscoring the connection among food, human rights, climate change, and justice, the author forcefully urges both personal and societal change—e.g., the Green New Deal. “The choice,” he writes, “is to change the system or suffer catastrophe.”
An expert’s vigorous argument for systemic food reform.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-328-97462-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
For fans only.
The hoodie-and-shorts-clad Pennsylvania senator blends the political and personal, and often not nicely.
Fetterman’s memoir addresses three major themes. The first—and the one he leads with—is depression and mental illness, which, combined with a stroke and heart trouble, brought him to a standstill and led him to contemplate suicide. The second is his rise to national-level politics from a Rust Belt town; as he writes, he’s carved a path as a contentious player with a populist streak and a dislike for elites. There are affecting moments in his personal reminiscences, especially when he writes of the lives of his working-class neighbors in impoverished southwestern Pennsylvania, its once-prosperous Monongahela River Valley “the most heartbreaking drive in the United States.” It’s the third element that’s problematic, and that’s his in-the-trenches account of daily politics. One frequent complaint is the media, as when he writes of one incident, “I am not the first public figure to get fucked by a reporter, and I won’t be the last. What was eye-opening was the window it gave into how people with disabilities navigate a world that doesn’t give a shit.” He reserves special disdain for his Senate race opponent Mehmet Oz, about whom he wonders, “If I had run against any other candidate…would I have lost? He got beaten by a guy recovering from a stroke.” Perhaps so, and Democratic stalwarts will likely be dismayed at his apparent warmish feelings for Donald Trump and dislike of his own party’s “performative protests.” If Fetterman’s book convinces a troubled soul to seek help, it will have done some good, but it’s hard to imagine that it will make much of an impression in the self-help literature. One wonders, meanwhile, at sentiments such as this: “If men are forced to choose between picking their party or keeping their balls, most men are going to choose their balls.”
For fans only.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593799826
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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