In How the World Eats, Julian Baggini warns against romanticizing food systems of the past. We can learn lessons about farming, hunting and gathering, and animal husbandry, but our food system has evolved over centuries—or even millennia—and it’s time to move forward with a different perspective. Baggini argues that changing the food system to be good for the planet and its inhabitants requires a global food philosophy, or a set of principles and values where everyone adopts a unified set of clear, defined principles. Drawing from myriad examples of environmentally and culturally responsible forms of agriculture (e.g. regenerative agriculture, pastoral husbandry, and sustainable intensification), Baggini believes we can take an all-of-the-above approach.
Baggini starts by looking at the evolution of various aspects of our food system, including farming methods, labor practices, animal husbandry and processing, and technology. Then he recommends seven global food principles to guide how our food systems should function, from growing practices to government policies.
These principles include approaches like circularity, which looks at regenerative cycles of inputs and outputs; the seemingly obvious food-centric principle, which focuses on whole foods versus commodities; and plurality, which accepts that there are many ways to grow food. The latter is one Baggini emphasizes throughout: We must find the good in every approach, even industrial agriculture and gene editing. While he is critical of certain methods, he’s not willing to throw them out wholesale.
Baggini acknowledges that since it’s hard to disagree with any of the principles, they could seem “too woolly, too thin.” Yet if we were to adopt them on a wide scale, he argues, they would be nothing short of transformative.
—Elizabeth Doerr
How to Feed the World: The History and Future of Food
By Vaclav Smil
I am not much of a data person, but I am a big fan of big ideas to solve big problems. So the title alone drew me to Vaclav Smil’s latest book. A professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba, Smil has built his body of work around data-driven research and analysis that tackles big questions; his 2022 book How the World Really Works earned high praise from Bill Gates and others.
In How to Feed the World, Smil begins with an exhaustive exploration of how we got here—including why we eat certain plants and animals and not others, and why the global food system doesn’t get the same economic and policy support as, say, technology supply chains. If you like data, this will likely interest you.
Smil lays solutions out at a very high level. He names many that we have covered for years: Reduce food waste, eat less beef, eat meat that is more humanely and sustainably produced, and support more efficient and productive agriculture in China and especially Africa. He also debunks what he sees as false or non-scalable solutions: organic farming, perennial crops, GMOs, and lab-grown meat.
But in explaining what would work, we’re left with only the broadest strokes of suggestions. “All countries need to minimize wholesale [food] storage and distribution losses,” is one prescription for reducing food waste, for instance. And climate change gets very little mention, which strikes me as potentially upending any dataset Smil is working with. In the end, Smil has given readers a bunch of data and a few suggestions as to what to do next, but the book falls far short of truly helping feed a world with 2 billion more people and a rapidly destabilizing climate.
—Matthew Wheeland
The Modern Huntsman Cookbook: Recipes and Stories Earned in Wild Places
By the Editors of Modern Huntsman Magazine
In December 1960, the writer Wallace Stegner penned an argument for wilderness, to help bolster desperate preservation efforts then underway. Stegner argued that the idea of wilderness itself had immeasurable value. “We simply need that wild country available to us,” he wrote, “even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.”
In its own subtle way, The Modern Huntsman Cookbook: Recipes and Stories Earned in Wild Places, makes a similar argument. Amid its recipes for wild boar ragú, glazed deer loin, and surf clam ceviche, offered by an assortment of hunters, fishers, and outdoor chefs, the book offers insightful essays, including from the naturalist Rick Bass. Each contributor argues for a way of life that would be (sadly) unsustainable for an entire modern society to undertake, even while its continuation feels somehow essential.
The editors have sought here to elevate hunting into something beyond abstraction, to connect it to culinary art. Here you’ll find meticulous guidance on building a fire, on choosing cooking equipment for flame and ember, and recipes that seek to deeply connect us to our food. Anyone with access to wild food will appreciate the recipes, accompanying essays, and rich, illustrative photography. Just as we need the idea of the wild available to us, we need the idea of the hunt—and, through books like this, a way to approach the edge and look in.
—Brian Calvert
My (Half) Latinx Kitchen: Half Recipes, Half Stories, All Latin American
By Kiera Wright-Ruiz
Among first-generation American cookbook authors, food writer Kiera Wright-Ruiz brings a unique perspective. Instead of sharing recipes passed down from her parents, her book reflects multiple traditions from the many people who raised her: an Ecuadorian grandfather, a Cuban foster mom, and a Mexican grandmother, among others.
Wright-Ruiz divides the book into chapters that are each devoted to someone whose cooking has impacted her. She prefaces each recipe with an entertaining origin story and supplements the book with moving essays. Some are delightful, like one about a day in the life of her aging grandfather, a former luchador (wrestler) with a penchant for fresh crabs and churrasco (grilled meat). Others are challenging, including her story about reading her foster-care logs for the first time to learn more about her placement with Cuban foster parents. Recipes range from soups and stews to fresh salsas, horchatas (sweet non-alcoholic beverages), desserts, and more. I found the tortillas de yuca, made with grated yuca and queso fresco, addictive. The seco de pollo, a chicken and tomato stew, does indeed bring “the ultimate feeling of coziness” that’s promised in the headnote.
Wright-Ruiz’s work is fueled by an open and honest drive to pay homage to the people who shaped her culinary identity, and it’s this sometimes joyful, sometimes complicated search for connection that makes her book a gratifying read for anyone hungry for a taste of Latinx food and community.
—Laura Candler
Planetary Eating: The Hidden Links between Your Plate and Our Cosmic Neighborhood
By Gidon Eshel
In an age of ephemeral hot takes flickering across social media feeds, Gideon Eshel’s Planetary Eating stands out like a stone monument to old-fashioned scholarship. The Bard College professor’s treatise is exhaustively researched—its bibliography alone features over 680 entries and takes up nearly a sixth of the book—and he readily admits that it’s “not everybody’s idea of a light read.” But for those with the patience to wade through this weighty tome, Eshel provides a comprehensive review of the evidence for and against grass-fed cattle production, grounding the debate in the context of climate science.
After careful consideration, he concludes that, in nearly all cases, one of the best planet-saving decisions an eater can make is to give up beef. “Forgo beef, and your resource needs drop two- to tenfold,” he declares. “Such huge impacts, achieved by fairly simple personal choices over which you have complete control right now, are hard to emulate on any other environmental realm.”
—Daniel Walton
The Quinoa Bust: The Making and Unmaking of an Andean Miracle Crop
By Emma McDonell
For much of its modern history, quinoa was a little-known crop, grown in the Andes of Bolivia and Peru and underappreciated by the rest of the world. But after a gradual series of introductions into the international market in the early 2000s, the Andean grain enjoyed a global boom, heralded as a superfood, high in protein and fiber, and a tool for fighting malnutrition.
Crop prices tripled from 2006 to 2013, and the United Nations General Assembly declared 2013 the International Year of Quinoa. But in the years following, the grain saw a gradual yet consistent decline because of fluctuations in the market and shifts in where the crop was produced, from mostly Puno, Peru, to regions all over the world.
Anthropologist Emma McDonell’s new book traces the rise and fizzle of quinoa, exploring how an unknown crop found itself in the global spotlight.
The early chapters focus on the scientists and researchers who identified quinoa’s potential as a superfood and the scientists, researchers, and government agencies that promoted the crop and made it a hit.
The book then delves into the unfortunate consequences of this transformation. Puno’s farmers, who could have reaped major economic benefits, instead found themselves competing on a global scale with agribusinesses that began mass-producing quinoa. McDonell’s book, which relies on ethnographic research and interviews, is informative and well-structured, touching upon the social, ecological, technological and political aspects of boom and bust. The narrative enables a specific examination of global capitalism and the unintended consequences of manipulating food paradigms—and might inspire anyone who eats to be more appreciative of what is on their plate.
—Amy Wu
Regenerating Earth: Farmers Working with Nature to Feed our Future
By Kelsey Timmerman
In the face of the dual destructive forces of climate change and industrial agriculture, it’s often easy to feel demoralized. But in this hopeful book, journalist Kelsey Timmerman, who lives in rural Indiana, reminds us that regenerative agriculture—which prioritizes building soil, sequestering carbon, and promoting ecological diversity—has devotees throughout the U.S. and around the world.
From farmer Mark Shepard in southwestern Wisconsin—who practices a form of permaculture he dubs “the STUN method” (Sheer Total Utter Neglect)—to Leshinka, a Maasai Mara herder who pursues holistic management at Kenya’s Enonkishu Conservancy, farmers are proving to their neighbors that growing and raising food in a regenerative way not only feeds their community but provides a more reliable source of income than do commodity crops.
Along Timmerman’s travels, we meet other visionaries. This includes Lee DeHaan at the Land Institute in Kansas, who is working to make Kernza, a trademarked wheatgrass, into an economically viable food crop, and Celestine Otieno, an activist in Kenya who counsels women on growing a diversity of non-commodity food crops. We also learn about a group of activists on Kaua’i who forced Dupont-Pioneer and Syngenta to disclose their use of restricted pesticides, leading to a ban of atrazine and chlorpyrifos across Hawai’i.
Timmerman acknowledges that regenerative agriculture is not a quick fix. The market for Kernza isn’t dependable yet, for example, and using Allan Savory’s holistic management and rotational grazing methods can be a hard sell in Kenya, where drought and desertification are rampant and skepticism of old-new ways of grazing is high.
In the end, though, he makes a strong case that regenerative agriculture in all its many guises is not only a boon for the climate but can, at the same time, be profitable for farmers and ranchers who practice it.
—Hannah Wallace
The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life
By Helen Whybrow
Helen Whybrow’s The Salt Stones is a deeply personal meditation on land, life, and the moral complexity of raising animals for food and fiber. A writer, farmer, and educator based in Vermont, Whybrow draws on decades of experience tending people, pastures, and animals—chiefly sheep and cattle.Her storytelling is both tender and unflinching, offering a portrait of farm life that honors the rhythms of nature while acknowledging the emotional weight of living among animals destined to die for us.
In one beautifully haunting moment, she recounts running her hand along the warm flank of a steer she’s raised from a calf, conscious that soon she’ll be placing cuts of its flesh on her family’s table.What makes this book so powerful is its refusal to separate love from loss. Whybrow invites readers into the intimate, often uneasy space where care, labor, and death intersect, without offering easy answers. She reshapes our understanding of stewardship and belonging, making The Salt Stones a luminous and necessary addition to the literature of food and farming.
—Jonnah Perkins
Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie
By Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty
The North American prairie boasts one of the most biologically rich ecosystems in the world—and one of the most overlooked. Shortgrass and tallgrass prairies can support a stunning diversity of wildlife, including bison, prairie dogs, and eagles; hundreds of butterfly species; and more than 1,600 native grasses and flowers. They can also sequester enormous amounts of carbon.
Unfortunately, these ecosystems have been nearly wiped out, starting 200 years ago as European settlers transformed the Midwest into a super-producer of corn and soybeans. The tallgrass prairie once covered millions of acres from Texas to Minnesota, and now just one percent remains.
Journalists Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty recount the massive ecological and historical evolution of the American prairie. Their focus ranges from pre-colonial times, when up to 60 million bison roamed the landscape, to our current era, dominated and polluted by industrial farming practices.
