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Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food book cover

Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food

by Frederick Kaufman

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SKU 9780470631928
A prominent food journalist follows the trail from Big Pizza to square tomatoes to exploding food prices to Wall Street, trying figure out why we can't all have healthy, delicious, affordable food
In 2008, farmers grew enough to feed twice the world's population, yet more people starved than ever before--and most of them were farmers. In Bet the Farm, food writer Kaufman sets out to discover the connection between the global food system and why the food on our tables is getting less healthy and less delicious even as the the world's biggest food companies and food scientists say things are better than ever. To unravel this riddle, he moves down the supply chain like a detective solving a mystery, revealing a force at work that is larger than Monsanto, McDonalds or any of the other commonly cited culprits--and far more shocking.
Kaufman's cover story for Harper's, "The Food Bubble," provoked controversy throughout the food world, and led to appearances on the NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, Fox Business News, Democracy Now, and Bloomberg TV, along with features on National Public Radio and the BBC World Service.
  • Visits the front lines of the food supply system and food politics as Kaufman visits farms, food science research labs, agribusiness giants, the United Nations, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and more
  • Explains how food has been financialized and the powerful consequences of this change, including: the Arab Spring, started over rising food prices; farmers being put out of business; food scientists rushing to make easy-to-transport, homogenized ingredients instead of delicious foods
  • Explains how the push for sustainability in food production is more likely to make everything worse, rather than better--and how the rise of fast food is bad for us, but catastrophic for those who will never even see a McNugget or frozen pizza

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Book details

Author
Frederick Kaufman
Imprint
Trade Paper Press, an imprint of Turner Publishing Company
Published
Pages
272
Formats
Hardcover
Subjects
History › United States
Topics
industrial agriculture · food system · food politics · Wall Street · global hunger · food journalism · investigative reporting · food industry
ISBN-13
9780470631928

About the author

FREDERICK KAUFMAN is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine and a Professor of English and Journalism at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. His recent books include The Money Plot: A History of Currency’s Power to Enchant, Control, and Manipulate, Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food and A Short History of the American Stomach.

Kaufman holds a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. His work has appeared in Foreign Policy, Wired, the New Yorker, Gourmet, Scientific American and the New York Times Magazine.

When he’s not writing, Kaufman has spoken on food justice at the General Assembly of the United Nations and appeared on MSNBC, Fox Business News, Bloomberg and the BBC World Service. That engagement with food systems and global economics runs throughout his books.

Frederick lives in New York.

More books by Frederick Kaufman →

Format: Hardcover