Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal: A Food Science Nutrition History Book

Our bookclub selected this book and I devoured it! It is well-written and easy to read, although the content and topic is seriously disturbing! I feel this is an important book to understand our past history with food and see where we can improve. Because it is time to start living with more awareness of the fuel we use to power our bodies, do more to protect our planet, and clean up our act for our children's sake! A "stick to your ribs" sort of book that will shift your thinking (if you allow it), in the similar vein as Fast Food Nation (Eric Schlosser) and The Omnivore's Dilemma (Michael Pollan).

This is an excellent book written by someone with deep knowledge of food and a love for real food and cooking. It took me quite a while to read this book. After the early chapters, I would complete a few pages and be so outraged that I simply couldn't continue. Why?Because Mark Bittman explicitly describes the processes that led to the toxic, poisonous, environmentally devastating highly processed food that nearly all of us in the U.S., and billions more around the world, eat today. I just had a conversation with a Black friend and here's an example of just one tactic that contributed to the dominance of gigantic Ag companies like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Cargill: the USDA enforced fines and regulations on Black farmers to the point that today: there basically aren't any. They had to give up their farms and these big companies bought the land and proceeded to do monoculture of soy, wheat, and corn.Industrialized agriculture and industrialized food has enriched billionaires at the same time as it has degraded our environment, the land itself, and our bodies and minds. The junk these companies purvey poisons all who consume it: slowly, over decades. These foods are 100% responsible for the obesity epidemic (75% of US adults are now overweight or obese).I am still angry after reading this book. I was already committed to good nutrition and healing my body through good food before reading this book. Now? I will never touch toxic processed food again. Yes, I would rather starve.This is a slow-moving genocide and murder of the soil, countless millions of animals, fish, and shellfish. No, I don't mean "everyone should be vegan": natural populations are destroyed by Big Ag's relentless devastating practices, from patented seeds to genetically modified seed that is made to be grown with various, ever-stronger pesticides.These liars, thieves, and murderers for the profit of a tiny, small number of people (there are 2,640 billionaires in the world as of May 2023 according to Forbes) have destroyed nearly everything that is good and health-giving about food and the land. It's tied to slavery and oppression of Black people (to this day). They KNOW the foods they make are un-nutritious and they KNOW the foods are addictive: they design them this way. It isn't just PepsiCo. It isn't just Kraft - in fact, most of these companies are merging now so they are one and the same.Big Ag and Big Food are nothing but outrageous assaulters of every single human and the planet itself. If you're overweight and ill and reading this and think "she is insane" -- buy this book and read it and tell me if you're going to eat Cheetos, Doritos and "Healthy Choice" frozen dinners again. Even gas station sushi would be better - and I'm not kidding. These human activities are some of the most destructive of everyone else in human history and it is shocking in its scope and devastating effect.

This is a book on the history of eating, farming, and the food industry. The first chapter on ancient farming and the food brain in us may be hard to verify, but nonetheless, leads the author to an important aspect of food – farming. Bittman examines American farming in detail because that is what he is most familiar with, but we thus do not know how other big farming communities farm. From the force-feeding of junk food, Bittman moves on to the great American Green revolution – touted as America’s gift to the developing world. The industrialisation of farmed food led to abundance and excess. Bittman examines where all the excess food go to, and what can be done to improve industrial agriculture. This book covers a lot of ground, but is written in a journalistic style and so I give it four stars instead of five, because it is not easy to verify the unnumerable claims made by the author. If you have time, read also, Robert Paarlberg’s ‘Resetting the Table’, published by Alfred Knopf. If you don not have time, read Paarlberg’s.

I felt the book was in two parts. The first few chapters talked about farming, farms, and how we are destroying our land. It's unsustainable treating it like we do. It's forcing us to use more and more chemicals. Where we used to be a nation of farmers, we now are controlled by a few corporations whose main interest is money, not your health. The second part of the book goes into details on the quality or should I say bad-quality of the foods that we eat. HPF, highly processed foods are destroying us along with our farming land. This book is a real eye-opener. It will make you think twice about your eating habits and about our farms.

This is a book that all government policy analysts should read. It details how we arrived at the mess we are in with our food supply. Mark Bittman not only details the effects that the industrialization of our food supply has had on our health as a population but also the racist policies which have gone along with it. As long as we allow corporate profits to control our food system (with its Ultra Processed Foods - UPFs) we are unlikely to survive as a species. We need to get back to small mixed farms feeding communities healthy, nutrient dense foods.This book covers a great deal of ground centered on food and in my reading of it comes to a similar conclusion that Chris Smaje came to in his book "A Small Farm Future." Taken together these two books offer us a direction which could, if adopted, save our species from self destruction.

This interesting but sent two copies of this book I orded 1 but changed me for only one

Such a great read for everyone interested in food, history, politics and development. I wasn’t expecting to like it so much, but it’s just so well written and packed full of great info

Great book but CD skips a lot. Better off getting it in print or on audible.