There's been a lot of interest over the last little while in food security - knowing we all have enough to eat and that what we do have is safe to eat. The slow food and local food movements are growing worldwide, and questions about altered food (genetically or chemically) are getting louder and more frequent.
For many of us, it's hard to know who to believe when we hear food safety and food supply discussions. Some of those discussions are quite heated and few of us have the training necessary to follow all the arguments. At times we're not even sure we know what all the questions are, let alone who's got the (believable/reliable/responsible/realistic) answers.
Feeding the future is a collection of expert opinions on a variety of food security issues including tainted beef, over-fishing, genetically modified foods, the obesity epidemic, and worldwide food distribution. Each author gets one chapter and the various authors don't necessarily agree with one another, but that makes the book more useful for the reader. Footnotes provide references to continue research on subjects that catch your interest or verify points you find hard to accept.
Editors Andrew Heintzman and Evan Solomon have done a good job of pulling such disparate voices together into a cohesive whole. They begin each chapter with a brief author/subject introduction that I found tremendously useful. They are also responsible for additional content added as sidebars to the main text.
Although the subtitle of this book (from fat to famine, how to solve the world's food crises) promises solutions, I would liken this book to a survey course. Solutions are certainly proposed but if resolving the issues were that simple, we would already be there. Instead, I would call this an excellent starting point for a self-directed study, or, at the very least, enough information to get you through a number of earnest conversations.
Feeding the future : from fat to famine, how to solve the world's food crises edited by Andrew Heintzman and Evan Solomon. Published in 2004 by Anansi. ISBN: 978-0-88784-744-8
About Me
- Carol
- What would you call this room? According to the floor plan, it's a living room and the first thing you see when you open our front door. It's not exactly a traditional living room set-up. Some would call it a studio. Others would call it a mess. It's where I build houses...and my family's OK with that.