Our Summer 2025 Food and Farming Book Guide | Civil Eats
Much change is underway on the food and agriculture front, to put it mildly. But it’s also summer, a time to step back, relax, and recharge. Toward that end, we at Civil Eats offer our annual summer book guide. These 23 new or forthcoming titles run the gamut, from big-picture examinations of food-system issues and food philosophies to histories, memoirs, and cookbooks. This year, we’ve included two illustrated titles, too: a graphic memoir about the American ginseng industry and an illustrated children’s book about the life of restaurateur Cecilia Chiang.
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We’re always looking for books that propose solutions to challenges in the food system, and this year we’re recommending several, including a guidebook to saving the planet, a collection of life lessons from chef and restaurateur José Andrés, and a look at what we can learn from the lives of honeybees. Happy reading!
A Banquet for Cecilia: How Cecilia Chiang Revolutionized Chinese Food in America
By Julie Leung and Melissa Iwai
“Imagine you are little Cecilia Chiang, the seventh daughter in a large and wealthy Chinese family,” begins this captivating children’s book about the restaurateur who transformed Chinese food in America. In a series of delicate and charming illustrations, we watch the blossoming of a gastronome: tiny Cecilia peering into the family kitchen, entranced by the sizzling of hot woks and smells of fried garlic, tangy vinegar, and soy sauce—and, moments later, nibbling a soup dumpling with rapt concentration.
In just a few dozen pages, author Julie Leung and illustrator Melissa Iwai take us through the events of Chiang’s dramatic life. They show her fleeing Beijing in 1943 as the Japanese invaded, walking 700 miles west with her sister to Chongquing (and discovering regional foods along the way); escaping the Chinese Civil War to live in Tokyo, where she started her first restaurant; and moving to San Francisco, where she opened her life’s triumph, the Mandarin.
At a time when Chinese food mostly meant cheap, forgettable chop suey, Chiang introduced America to a dazzling menu of authentic regional Chinese dishes from her childhood, like twice-cooked pork, beggar’s chicken, and tea-smoked duck—many vividly described and pictured in this book’s pages. Cecilia Chiang died five years ago, at age 100, and her life has been well documented in the press and in her own memoirs. A Banquet for Cecilia finds a new, surprisingly intimate way to tell her story. It is also a powerful, joyful reminder—especially at this moment—of how immigrants have enriched our country.
—Margo True
Change the Recipe: Because You Can’t Build A Better World Without Breaking Some Eggs
By José Andrés
Spanish-American chef and restaurateur José Andrés is known the world over for unrelenting relief efforts via his nonprofit, World Central Kitchen, which serves chef-prepared meals to people impacted by natural disasters and during humanitarian crises.
But above all, he’s a cook—a fundamentally human role, he says, that requires an immense level of adaptability. “To survive and thrive, to change the world around you, you need the skills to adapt in a crisis, to take a different turn in life,” he writes. That’s a central tenet of his guiding philosophy and the countless hard-learned life lessons he shares in his latest book. Many of his snackable suggestions—Control Your Fire, Get Out of the Frying Pan, Don’t Burn Yourself—sound like advice for aspiring chefs. In reality, these are tips for all of us, about taking risks, creating community, and nourishing our world.
He accompanies this advice with endearing anecdotes about the accomplishments, mistakes, and embarrassments that shaped him, from his childhood in Spain and his early restaurant days in Washington, D.C. to his commendable foray into global philanthropy. A powerful collection of teachable moments from one of the food world’s most influential figures, this book is ideal for those looking for inspiration both in the kitchen and in the world today.
—Kate Nelson
Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes From the Edge of the World
By Art Cullen
It’s easy to forget that as recently as 30 years ago, supporting the expansion of the industrial animal farms that now dominate certain sectors of Iowa’s farmland grid was not a winning political position. Art Cullen remembers. In fact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning publisher of Iowa’s Storm Lake Times Pilot traces the state’s transformation back much further. He recalls a time of seed saving, when a small farm could feed a family; recounts legendary environmentalist Aldo Leopold foreshadowing the consequences of the Green Revolution-based shift toward farm efficiencies; and progresses to an entire state’s river system befouled by manure.
Cullen’s book explores those themes in what reads like a series of letters the author is writing to his old friend Marty. Through personal reflections, tangents, and the steady (and sometimes meandering) unspooling of arguments, he paints a picture of what happens when domination—over animals, fertile landscapes, Native people, and the immigrant workers who feed us—drives agricultural and community development.
The book invites readers to see the decline of their towns and landscapes not through the distorted lens of the politicians who court them for votes and profit, but by looking squarely at and connecting true threats: corporate consolidation, the exploitation of working people, and a climate warming fast enough to end it all. “We are left with little choice but to change before we burn ourselves up,” he writes. Surprisingly, from his little corner of Northwest Iowa, he still sees a path toward making that happen.
—Lisa Held
Dirty Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family
By Jill Damatac
In this unflinching memoir, writer Jill Damatac chronicles the indignities she and her family endured as undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Along the way, she deftly braids narratives about Filipino foodways, mythology, and histories of colonial rule with more personal episodes—of domestic and sexual violence and her three suicide attempts.
The term “dirty kitchen” describes the partly outdoor common space found in Filipino homes where tasks like big-batch cooking, butchering, and fire roasting occur. As a home cook, Damatac prepares Filipino dishes almost ceremoniously: Her arms burn making lengua kare-kare “the old way,” which requires a physicality rooted in a time before this type of meat and peanut stew was made with instant seasoning mixes. For her, preparing and eating Filipino meals was a means of survival “in a land that cared nothing for us.” She opens each chapter with a list of ingredients for the Filipino dishes that follow—bayah wine for pinikpikan (a chicken or duck specialty) and eggs for spamsilog (fried Spam, garlic rice, and eggs), for example—and weaves commentary throughout.
Dirty Kitchen unpacks the colonial oppression that decimated the Philippines, and the resulting moral injury that for generations has manifested as shame and a sense of inferiority. “So much of what is indigenous to the Philippines has been destroyed, overwritten in the blood of battle and occupation,” she writes.
I grew up in a quiet Detroit suburb, a daughter of Filipino immigrants. Although the memoir’s lacerating images of violence struck me with sorrow, its testaments to Filipino resilience were nourishing. Through the lens of food, Damatac has written a revelation for children of the Filipino diaspora searching for unsanitized answers about their heritage. But she has also created valuable reference for anyone invested in Indigenous food traditions and critiques of colonialism.
—Eleanore Catolico
The Fish Counter
By Marion Nestle
Years ago, when I was working at a lifestyle magazine, I helped put together a shopper’s guide to sustainable, healthful seafood. As we learned more about the dire state of our fisheries, we realized we were only skimming the surface of a labyrinthine topic. So, when news came this year that the redoubtable Marion Nestle, our country’s leading nutritionist (and a Civil Eats advisor), was releasing a short book on how to shop for seafood, I was delighted—and then, as I dove into the book, also unsettled by the true scope of the problem.
Nestle is known for the depth of her research and for not mincing words. Within the first few pages of The Fish Counter—a standalone excerpt from her revised edition of What to Eat Now, coming this fall—she states: “To make intelligent choices of fish at supermarkets, you have to know more than you could possibly imagine about nutrition, fish toxicology, and the life cycle and ecology of fish—the kind of fish it is, what it eats, where it was caught, and whether it was farmed or wild.
If you are at all concerned about environmental, labor, or human rights issues, you will also want to know how the fish was raised and caught, and whether its stocks are sustainable.”
Nestle then plunges us into those chilly waters, showing us the full extent of our seafood troubles in methodical detail, layering in history, science, and, especially, politics. Lack of political will prevents us from grasping many of these problems, she reveals: Seafood industry lobbyists exert influence on the dietary guidelines, for instance, and neither our government nor the fish industry are willing to confront the main source of methylmercury in our seafood: coal-burning power plants.
So what are we seafood lovers to do? This book deters us from buying most fish, but spurs us to fight for them. In the end, Nestle says, our best path is to educate ourselves and then take action. Tell our congressional representatives what we think. Join a fish advocacy group and work collectively for change. “Like so many other food issues,” she says, “safe and sustainable fisheries demand democracy in action.”
—Margo True
Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet
By Stuart Gillespie
Our global food system was originally designed to prevent famine by mass-producing cheap calories, but it is now a driving force of worldwide obesity and undernutrition, as well as the climate crisis. For 40 years, health and nutrition expert Stuart Gillespie has been fighting to transform the system through his work with the United Nations and the International Food Policy Research Institute.
In his new book, he unpacks how our current food system is working against us—to the benefit of billion-dollar corporations. In examining the current global malnutrition crisis, Gillespie describes how colonialism, the Cold War, and corporate capitalism shaped the food system to prioritize cheap, uniform food with little nutritional value, leading to undernutrition and obesity. He dissects how political, economic, and social structures perpetuate the conditions of malnutrition and exposes how transnational corporations profit off keeping people sick.
They prey on vulnerable marginalized groups, he explains, and they interfere with policies and research that bolster positive change—all while investing in remedies for the ill effects of their own products. For example, he writes, Nestlé sells multivitamins to be taken after bariatric surgery for obesity, and several “Big Food” corporations, such as Kraft Heinz, also own diet companies.
Though dense at times, the book thoughtfully weaves in case studies that Gillespie has both researched and witnessed first-hand, making for a riveting and eye-opening read. Taking lessons from successful and failed public-health policy interventions throughout history, Gillespie lays out a playbook to challenge the power of “Big Food.”
He calls on governments to create policies that reduce corporate control; on researchers to keep studying nutrition without corporate influence; and on individuals to pressure their governments to act. In doing so, Gillespie seeks to radically transform the power dynamics of the food system so we can live in a more equitable and nutritious world.
—Riley Ramirez
Ginseng Roots: A Memoir
By Craig Thompson
In the 1980s, farmers in the tiny community of Marathon, Wisconsin, cultivated the most American ginseng in the entire world, which they sold primarily to the Chinese market for medicinal purposes. For 10 summers of his childhood, Craig Thompson worked in the Marathon ginseng fields. He used the dollar per hour he earned to purchase comic books, which fueled his love of drawing and eventual career as a graphic novelist.
In Ginseng Roots, a reported memoir in graphic novel form, Thompson examines the medicinal plant that shaped his early life. He shares both the 300-year history of ginseng and his own relationship with the plant, which is tied up with his experience growing up working-class in the rural Midwest.
He revisits the farmers who once employed him, tells the story of a Hmong boy who worked in the fields alongside him, interviews big-shot growers at the Wisconsin Ginseng Festival, and even journeys to Taiwan, China, and South Korea to examine the central role of the plant in those cultures.
In tones of black, gray, and red, Thompson’s exquisitely drawn book is a visual masterpiece that tells a sweeping story of globalization, industrial agriculture, immigration, labor, class, and religion—all through the lens of the strange, humanoid ginseng root. Thompson also weaves in his experiences reporting the story, as he manages a painful health hand condition, navigates the aging of his evangelical parents, considers his relationship with his siblings, and ponders place and the meaning of home. In all, Ginseng Roots is personal, educational, and very worth a read.
—Christina Cooke
How the World Eats: A Global Food Philosophy
By Julian Baggini
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.
We hear from ranchers, entomologists, geographers, water works departments, and tribal leaders—each helping explain the value of the prairie and what gets lost when it’s plowed under.
We also learn about the people and nonprofits leading conservation efforts to restore prairie ecosystems, like Practical Farmers of Iowa, Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation, and the Buffalo Nations Grasslands Alliance. Sea of Grass is an engaging read and a rallying cry for a remarkable ecosystem and the people who have devoted their lives to it.
—Laura Candler
Serving the Public: The Good Food Revolution in Schools, Hospitals and Prisons
By Kevin Morgan
We are what we eat, the old adage goes, but some people—including prisoners, hospital patients, and children receiving school-provided food—have very little control over their diets. In Serving the Public, Kevin Morgan analyzes various successes and failures when it comes to feeding these particularly vulnerable populations.
A professor of governance and development at the University of Cardiff in Wales, Morgan examines recent and ongoing efforts to source healthy, nutritious, and sustainable meals to often-overlooked groups. Using case studies largely drawn from the United Kingdom (but with some examples from the U.S. and Sweden), the book offers success stories alongside examples of efforts that failed. We learn about the enduring revitalization of school food in Sweden’s third-largest city as well as the rise of the loathed Nutraloaf, fed to prisoners in the U.S.
Morgan acknowledges pervasive issues such as regional and national politics that often thwart real progress, the outsize impact of various lobbying groups, and the challenges of supply chain logistics. Finally, the book presents fascinating tidbits of history, including a look at the link between food and several notorious prison riots.
“Food is a common denominator of so much social and political activity around the world,” Morgan writes. Serving the Public deserves to be on the reading list of anyone interested in the interconnectedness of diet, health, and society.
—Katherine Kornei
Setting a Place for Us: Recipes and Stories of Displacement, Resilience, and Community from Eight Countries Impacted by War
By Hawa Hassan
“We who experience violent or invasive conflict in our communities and daily lives are more than our travails,” writes Somali-American chef and James Beard Award-winning cookbook author Hawa Hassan, who was displaced to a refugee camp in Kenya at just five years old.
A must-read addition to your library, her cookbook demonstrates love, affection, and respect for its subject matter, and covers a wide swath of territory, from Afghanistan to Yemen. Each beautifully photographed chapter opens with a brief timeline of the historical events and context surrounding the country’s conflict and an invitation to think beyond stereotypes. The book highlights El Salvador, for example, as a country rich in history with generous people and outstanding food despite the civil war that devastated it from 1980 to 1992 in the wake of a far-right coup.
In addition to eating at the tables of ordinary families and in a variety of restaurants and food stalls, Hassan spent a year reporting this cookbook. She interviewed chefs, importers, and other food professionals in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, El Salvador, Lebanon, and Liberia—as well as members of various diasporas in the U.S.—to offer a collection of rich profiles.
The accompanying recipes—like a delicious ground-peanut soup from Liberia and borani banjan (a stewed eggplant dish with garlicky yogurt sauce) from Afghanistan—are all clearly-written and accessible. They reflect culinary traditions, preserved through hardship and displacement, that anchor the diaspora in a sense of place and connection with home. Some also illustrate the influences of colonialism, as is the case with om ali, a bread pudding from Egypt that references European cuisine while integrating Middle Eastern ingredients.
You’ll close this book with a heightened appreciation of the power of setting a place at the table and sharing cultural traditions, no matter where you are.
—s.e. smith
Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick
By Murray Carpenter
I grew up in a family of Coca-Cola drinkers. One of my brothers drank a couple of 2-liter bottles every day for years, and I couldn’t help but suspect that his stomach problems were related to his soda habit. That curiosity led me to Sweet and Deadly.It’s a fascinating book that makes two main arguments: that Coca-Cola is a significant contributor to chronic disease and that the company uses its well-oiled disinformation machine to obscure the soda’s health risks.Author Murray Carpenter traces how the sugar industry’s early PR efforts to influence nutrition policy and public opinion laid the groundwork for a PR playbook adopted by the tobacco industry and Coca-Cola: sow doubt, fund front groups that defend its interests, hire “experts” to back up its claims, and spend lavishly to defeat legislation like soda taxes.
Unlike Big Tobacco, Coca-Cola has been winning the PR war for years, dating back to 1911, when the company successfully defended itself in court against charges including that the drink was addictive and marketed to kids.Since then, soda consumption has skyrocketed while public health has declined. Researchers have associated regular consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages with elevated (cardiovascular disease) mortality, among other health impacts. Today, unhealthy Americans outnumber healthy ones, with two-thirds being obese or overweight.Coca-Cola isn’t entirely to blame for all of this, of course, but it is undoubtedly a fixture in our unhealthy American diet. As for my family, I am relieved that they have scaled back their soda consumption for health reasons. But every once in a while, they still can’t resist reaching for a bottle of Coke.
—Tilde Herrera
The Italian Summer Kitchen: Timeless Recipes for La Dolce Vita
By Cathy Whims with Illustrations by Kate Lewis
When chef Cathy Whims opened Nostrana in 2005, she introduced diners in Portland, Oregon, to the glorious simplicity of regional Italian fare. From the beginning, she showed her commitment to local, regenerative agriculture: succulent tomatoes from nearby 47th Avenue Farm, Chester blackberries from Ayers Creek, and potatoes from Prairie Creek Farm.
Now we can bring some of Whims’ magic to our own kitchens with her first cookbook: The Italian Summer Kitchen. In this delightful guide, with illustrations by artist Kate Lewis, Whims makes iconic Italian dishes like fried squash blossoms and pollo alla Romana accessible to home cooks. Though not a Nostrana cookbook, per se, a few of its signature dishes do appear here. Fans of the restaurant will be thrilled to have recipes for the summer fruit crisp with almond cream and its signature radicchio-Caesar mash-up—inspired, Whims reveals, by a salad she had at Locanda Veneta in Los Angeles.
The cookbook is the perfect gift for the gardener in your life. Recipes are well-suited to summer’s backyard abundance. There are a dozen that use zucchini and their blossoms. Others make use of dandelion greens, peppers, tomatoes, and eggplant. Even fruit gets a starring role—from a savory strawberry and basil risotto to a cantaloupe confettura (jam).
—Hannah Wallace
Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters
By Jennifer Clapp
A combine harvester slicing through a monoculture cornfield is the epitome of a well-oiled machine. So too, argues Jennifer Clapp, is the entire array of economic, technological, and political factors that have converged to dominate the world’s agriculture. Through the lens of North American grain farming, the University of Waterloo professor dissects how companies initially commodified key farm inputs like seeds and fertilizers, then used their early advantages to secure lasting, outsized market power.
Titans of Industrial Agriculture is particularly illuminating on the concept of lock-ins, where the adoption of one new technology begets reliance on another: the weed-killer glyphosate and “Roundup Ready” corn, engineered to survive glyphosate, for example, are both produced by Bayer.
Clapp’s analysis clearly shows how these dynamics continue into the present day, including seed companies’ efforts to guarantee control of intellectual property around gene editing—acquiring startups, exclusive licenses, and patents to produce crops that resist herbicides made by the same companies. She proposes diversity as an antidote to this dominance, as promoted by antitrust reform and other public policy. Only when small-scale companies and farmers can compete on fair terms, Clapp suggests, will a widespread transformation of the food system be possible.
—Daniel Walton
Tools to Save Our Home Planet: A Changemaker’s Guidebook
Edited by Nick Mucha, Jessica Flint, and Patrick Thomas
A warming planet threatens everything we need to live: our food, our water, and the people around us. Yet any progress in the U.S. is likely to be delayed (if not already rolled back) as the second Trump administration refuses to confront climate change. Facing so little action on such an urgent crisis, one can easily spiral into existential eco-anxiety. That’s where Patagonia’s Tools to Save Our Home Planet: A Changemaker’s Guidebook aims to step in. Through curated essays, case studies, and how-to’s from dozens of contributors, the environmentally conscious apparel brand (which also admits it’s impossible for any company to be truly sustainable) wants to inspire readers to “double down on your passion”—and tackle our greatest crises.
At times, the book reads like it’s geared for leaders in the nonprofit world, rather than being a guide for the everyday person looking to take a leap into activism. Nevertheless, the collection’s success stories and practical knowledge gives readers insight on how to make change and navigate the hurdles that inevitably come with it. Reporter Jessica Flint explains how a program targeting the treatment of porters on Mount Kilimanjaro led to better working conditions, for example, and attorney Deepa Padmanabha describes how corporations and powerful people use lawsuits to attack First Amendment rights and silence any resistance. Justice is the work of very determined people who fight for their rights, and inspiration and guidance can jumpstart action—the key ingredient for progress.
—Sam Delgado
The Wisdom of the Hive: What Honeybees Can Teach Us about Collective Wellbeing
By Michelle Cassandra Johnson and Amy Burtaine
Save the bees. The phrase has become ubiquitous, appearing on canvas bags, bumper stickers, and coffee mugs. In The Wisdom of the Hive, though, authors Michelle Cassandra Johnson and Amy Burtaine invert such thinking with a question: “What if the bees are here to save us?” As an indicator species that reflects the health of the broader ecosystem, bees reflect the wellbeing (or illness) of life on our planet. The authors, both equity educators who keep bees themselves, remind us: “The bees know that everything is connected, that there is no separation. It is us humans who have forgotten.”
While many books have been written about the ties between humanity and honeybees—without whom our lives would be severely nutritionally impoverished, as their pollinating services help many food crops bear fruit—The Wisdom of the Hive is unique in how it turns to the bees as a source of knowledge and their hives as a model for society. Drawing on their experiences as beekeepers, Johnson and Burtaine invite deep self-reflection through activities, meditations, and questions that seek to help us reconnect with our bodies, other people, and the natural world to which we belong.
—Elena Valeriote
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