Big Picture

These sources cover more than one step in the food system. Instead, they offer overarching arguments about humans and our relationship to food. As such, they are sorted by topic rather than type of media.

 
 

Questions to consider: What did these authors get right? What parts of their arguments and solutions are still relevant and which can we leave in the past?

Advocacy

  • Lobbying for Change: Find Your Voice to Create a Better Society (Alemanno, 2017)

  • Bite Back: People Taking on Corporate Food and Winning (Jayaraman and De Master, 2020)

  • Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (And Winning) (Nestle, 2015)

History

  • Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Mintz, 1985)

  • Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Scott, 2017)

  • Nature’s Metropolis (Cronan, 1992)

  • A History of the World in 6 Glasses (Standage, 2005)

  • Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (Diamond, 1997)

  • The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African Culinary History in the Old South (Twitty, 2017)

Fiction

  • Ishmael (Quinn, 1992)

 

Unsorted

  • Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Scott, 1998)

  • Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism: Understanding the Political Economy of What We Eat (Holt-Giménez, 2017)

Food Systems

  • Introduction to the U.S. Food System: Public Health, Environment, and Equity (Neff, 2015)

  • The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Pollan, 2006)