Kass’ well-chosen anecdotes offer valuable lessons for today’s food and agriculture activists far beyond the capital, where he led efforts on children’s health and nutrition. He emphasizes the importance of harnessing cultural moments, such as a high-school football team crediting its wins to healthier cafeteria food to build support for policy. And through the story of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which established free breakfast for students in low-income schools, he explains how grassroots activism can encourage lawmakers to support broader measures.
The son of a union leader, Kass is honest about the tensions between idealism and practicality, illustrated with real-world examples, like negotiations between the Obama administration and Walmart. Advocates for a better food system have no choice but to engage with deep-rooted power structures, he argues.
“Beat the shit out of them when they are not aggressively taking on climate and health,” he writes, “praise them when they make a genuine effort, work to push investors to take into account these other issues when they invest, and help create more and more demand for better products.”
—Daniel Walton
Little Red Barns: Hiding the Truth from Farm to Fable
By Will Potter
Ubiquitous in Americana, red barns symbolize a bucolic existence where farming is in harmony with land and animals, and where farmers are humble stewards. This actually is true in the case of some farms. But as investigative journalist Will Potter posits, agricultural corporations misappropriate this narrative to hide what happens on factory farms, or Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). These CAFOs are marked by cramped cages, toxic waste ponds, air and water pollution, slaughter by suffocation—the list goes on.
In Little Red Barns, Potter digs into the insidious agribusiness collusion with lobbyists, elected officials, and even some farmers and scientists to preserve business as usual behind the red barn façade. He recounts his own trajectory, from his punk teen years, when he encountered animal activism for the first time, to his work as an award-winning journalist, when he came to understand how CAFO titans vilified activists (and journalists) in order to paint themselves as victims of “terrorism.” Backed by agribusiness, Potter writes how states passed “ag-gag” laws to suppress on-farm investigations, further blurring the lines between government and corporations.
Potter’s reporting takes him quite literally into the muck to explain big ag’s vigorous cover-up of “intersecting world-ending crises.” As agribusiness erodes civil liberties and censors information to conceal its role in climate change and environmental degradation, he shows how these actions have become a microcosm of the global rise of authoritarianism. But look behind that little red barn, Potter encourages, “and through our collective action—our shared testimony—we will write a new story.”
—Leorah Gavidor
Living Off Grid: 50 Steps to Unplug, Become Self-Sufficient, and Build the Homestead of Your Dreams
By Ryan Mitchell
With the cuts and threats to food assistance this year, you may be wondering how to become less dependent on outside sources for food. Ryan Mitchell gives you all you need to know in Living Off Grid. Going off-grid for Mitchell is a means of detaching your household from external systems for food, water, electricity, and other utilities. Mitchell built his own rural homestead—a tiny house, a vast garden, and a modest amount of livestock—on 11 acres in North Carolina.
Food independence is an essential reason to go off-grid, he says, especially given the fragility of the food system. Mitchell advises people to start slowly, “whittling away on your overall reliance on stores.” Start by looking at which foods you can access locally through community-supported agriculture (CSAs) or farmers’ markets (especially for meat)—and which you can grow yourself. You’re not likely to reach complete food independence, he says, but with diligence and patience, it’s possible to get close.
While this guide provides tips for city- and suburb-dwellers, like joining a community garden, it mostly focuses on setting up in rural areas, taking readers through the arduous processes of looking for and buying land, setting up the homestead, and building an off-grid life.
Mitchell advises that self-sufficiency isn’t just about you; it’s about tapping into community. “You won’t be able to do this alone, nor should you try,” he writes. Incorporating his own experience, he provides an excellent one-stop resource for anyone looking to disconnect from an increasingly unreliable food system and rely on themselves, and their neighbors, instead.
—Elizabeth Doerr
Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food—and Our Future
By Bruce Friedrich
Building a steak out of cultured animal cells or engineering a plant-based burger that behaves just like ground beef might be tall scientific challenges. But such projects are more feasible than changing human nature, Bruce Friedrich argues. The founder and president of the Good Food Institute, a think tank that champions “alternative proteins,” Friedrich is concerned about the impact of industrialized livestock on the climate, human health, and animal welfare. In Meat, he lays out a techno-optimistic vision for addressing those harms—not by curbing demand, but by replacing supply.
“Meat is just too visceral a desire, too culturally embedded, too normatively accepted” for modern society to reduce its consumption in any meaningful way, he argues. Instead, he calls for governments and businesses to invest in alternative proteins, as they have in digital infrastructure and renewable energy. While critics have questioned the sustainability and corporate consolidation of the alt-protein industry, Friedrich thinks it can improve technology and reduce prices to the point where alt-meats outcompete farm-raised flesh.
That Silicon Valley-style innovation, Friedrich adds, could free up land currently used for animal feed to practice high-value regenerative farming or agroforestry. Such changes would require an evolution in federal farm policy, he admits, a task “harder, I suspect, than anything else I’m suggesting in this book.”
—Daniel Walton
Recipes from the American South
By Michael W. Twitty
Culinary historian Michael Twitty’s new cookbook is a trove of knowledge focused on classic Southern dishes and culinary traditions, from cathead biscuits to Southern fried chicken to Hoppin’ John—and its lesser-known sibling, Limping Susan, made with okra. Twitty’s introduction describes the “multicultural gumbo” of the largest culinary region in the U.S., acknowledging the important contributions of women, Native people, enslaved Africans, and non-European immigrants.
“The politics of Southern food is omnipresent, baked in from the beginning,” he writes. “Southern food is soaked in Native removal, racial caste and social justice, gender roles, ability issues, sexuality, and class.”
Full of simple, elegant photographs, the book is a joy to explore. The James Beard Award–winning author organizes it by menu categories, from “Breads, Biscuits & Breakfasts” to “Desserts, Pies & Sweets,” and tops each recipe with a short but succulent explanation of the dish’s place in history and culture. Twitty covers pan-Southern classics like chicken and dumplings and sweet-potato pie as well as regional dishes like Gullah-Geechee pot roast and Maryland crab soup. (When it comes to barbecue sauce, he smartly pays homage to both sides of the eastern- and western-style rivalry in my home state of North Carolina.)
Certain recipes—for frog legs, turtle soup, and possum and sweet potatoes—probably won’t enter my regular repertoire, but I enjoyed learning each dish’s place in Southern cuisine (and Twitty offers substitutions to make them more accessible). Capturing the depth, breadth, and complexity of Southern food, this might be one of the most practical and delicious history books out there.
—Christina Cooke
A School Lunch Revolution
By Alice Waters
Nearly 20 years ago, Alice Waters, the visionary owner of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, wrote about her life’s other passion project. Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea grew out of her work at a local middle school, and made a fervent case for integrating gardening and cooking into school curricula, to awaken students not only to their lessons but also to the natural world.
Now Waters (who is also a member of the Civil Eats advisory board) has published a companion cookbook, A School Lunch Revolution, that proposes another way to transform school food: school-supported regenerative agriculture. In the introduction, she envisions schools buying food directly from organic, regenerative farmers and then cooking it in school kitchens, to boost farm income, climate resilience, and children’s health, too. It’s welcome encouragement at a time when schools are being pushed to give up ultra-processed foods—and a challenge, given this year’s cancellation of a federal farm-to-school program.
The book’s simple, healthy recipes exemplify what school meals could be like if they were based on local, regenerative agriculture: affordable, culturally diverse, delicious of course, and beautiful—because, Waters points out, “beauty is a language of care” that nourishes children’s spirits. Kid-friendly recipes like whole-leaf salads meant for dipping into dressings, buttermilk pancakes, carrot and cucumber sushi, and chile-braised pork tacos all keep these principles in mind.
Although A School Lunch Revolution only briefly suggests how, exactly, this ambitious vision could be implemented at scale (possibly through food hubs), it isn’t meant to be a detailed guide. Waters’ great strength has always been to light the way.
—Margo True
The Self-Fed Farm and Garden: A Return to the Roots of the Organic Method
By Eliot Coleman
What is organic food? Thirty-six years after organic-farming pioneer Eliot Coleman wrote his first book on the subject, he probes this question further in The Self-Fed Farm and Garden. Coleman argues that organic farming means understanding and working with the soil’s living organisms to enhance long-term sustainability. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has broadened its organic certification standards to include practices like hydroponic growing, which does not involve soil.
Part organic farming theory and part how-to, the book cites 19th- and 20th-century farmers who relied on “process, not products” for a “self-fed” farm. Though inputs for organic farming are widely available for purchase, Coleman advocates for “green manure” crops, which are grown on-site and can enhance soil fertility over time. He then lays out precisely how to achieve this on a small-scale farm, advising on everything from cover-crop choice to tools for sowing seeds.
Along the way, he offers glimpses of his early farm experiences (“none of us could afford tractors with plows”) and includes beautiful photos from his Four Season Farm in Maine, which illustrate these ideas in practice. Coleman helps us understand that every food choice is a decision about how we want to treat the soil. This makes The Self-Fed Farm and Garden an ideal book for curious eaters, food growers, and anyone who wishes to be a better steward of the land.
—Laura Candler
Turtle Island: Food and Traditions of the Indigenous Peoples of North America
By Sean Sherman with Kate Nelson and Kristin Donnelly
When Sean Sherman was growing up on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, he loved his family’s traditional meals but didn’t know much about the wider world of Indigenous food. Now a winner of multiple James Beard awards and founder of the celebrated Indigenous restaurant Owanmi, in Minneapolis, he’s traced his culinary awakening in Turtle Island, a triumph of a cookbook that explores Native cuisines, landscapes, and histories from Alaska to the Yucatan Peninsula.
