A cogent, revealing look at the future of food.
A perceptive analysis of America's food system.
Political scientist Paarlberg, who teaches public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School, levels a well-informed, evidence-based critique of a broad swath of players in food production and consumption: food companies (which process, package, transport, and advertise products), supermarkets, and restaurant chains, all of which have created “food swamps” of unhealthy choices; as well as “advocacy organizations fixated on local food and organic food” and “those who push for agroecology or food sovereignty over green revolution farming.” He debunks food movement activists such as Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, and Alice Waters, calling their advocacy of preindustrial agriculture elitist. A return to those farming methods, he writes, “can work on a small scale for those with plenty of money to spend, but it will never be a society-wide solution.” Drawing on scientific and economic research, combined with visits to farms and food plants, Paarlberg asserts persuasively that “modern farming protects the environment not only by using less land compared to several decades ago; it also uses less water, less fossil energy, and fewer chemicals.” Analyzing the use of pesticides, fertilizers, and GMOs, the author argues that much fear of these products is unsupported by research. “Visions that privilege what comes from nature over what is made by people have a mystical appeal,” he writes, “but they malfunction as practical guidance.” Paarlberg highlights many commercial farms that judiciously employ scientific methods in planting, harvesting, and raising livestock. Yet for many food activists, the idea of applying modern science to agriculture and food production has “become strangely controversial”—even though “compared to small farms and local marketing systems, bigger operations are better able to detect and avoid contamination.” Paarlberg criticizes commercial farm organizations, too, for supporting food processing companies, and he calls for farmers to become strong advocates for healthful eating.
A cogent, revealing look at the future of food.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-525-65644-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
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
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.
A deeply informed critique of the malicious initiatives currently using gender as a political tool to arouse fear and strengthen political and religious institutions.
In their latest book, following The Force of Nonviolence, Butler, the noted philosopher and gender studies scholar, documents and debunks the anti-gender ideology of the right, the core principle of which is that male and female are natural categories whose recognition is essential for the survival of the family, nations, and patriarchal order. Its proponents reject “sex” as a malleable category infused with prior political and cultural understandings. By turning gender into a “phantasmatic scene,” they enable those in positions of authority to deflect attention from such world-destroying forces as war, predatory capitalism, and climate change. Butler explores the ideology’s presence in the U.S., the U.K., Uganda, and Hungary, countries where legislation has limited the rights of trans and homosexual people and denied them their sexual identity. The author also delves into the ideology’s roots among Evangelicals and the Catholic Church and such political leaders as Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. Butler is particularly bothered by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who treat trans women as “male predators in disguise.” For the author, “the gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never be fully closed.” They imagine “a world where the many relations to being socially embodied that exist become more livable” and calls for alliances across differences and “a radical democracy informed by socialist values.” Butler compensates for the thinness of some of their recommendations with an astute dissection of the ideology’s core ideas and impressive grasp of its intellectual pretensions. This is a wonderfully thoughtful and impassioned book on a critically important centerpiece of contemporary authoritarianism and patriarchy.
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780374608224
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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