Diet For A Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis

(Paperback)

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Description

If we are what we eat, then, as Chris Cook contends in this powerful look at the food industry, we are not in good shape. Mad Cow disease, bird flu epidemics, tainted meat scandals, and Mercury-laced fish - we are evidently surrounded by unsafe food. The planet itself is at risk from today's farming practices. "Diet for a Dead Planet", now available in paperback, takes us beyond Fast Food Nation to explain why our entire food system is in crisis. Corporate control of farms and supermarkets, unsustainable drives to increase agribusiness productivity and profits, misplaced subsidies for exports, and anaemic regulation have all combined to produce a grim harvest. Food, our most basic necessity, has become a force behind a staggering array of social, economic, and environmental epidemics. Yet there is another way. Cook argues cogently for a whole new way of looking at what we eat - one that places healthy, sustainably-produced food at the top of the menu for a change.

Reviews

"It is worth considering how [Christopher Cook's] concerns apply to leafy green Ireland." - IRISH INDEPENDENT "Cook takes care to avoid blind alleys in order to argue for a genuinely sustainable system of making, distributing and marketing food... In calling for profound change Cook recognises the enormity of the challenge involved." - THE HERALD "A comprehensive expose of the food industry that underlines the urgency of the need for change." - SOCIALIST REVIEW"

Author Bio

Christopher D. Cook is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work has appeared in Harper's, Mother Jones, the Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, and The Economist. In 1998 he won an Aronson Award for an investigative report on welfare agencies requiring recipients to work in dangerous meatpacking plants. Among other honours, he has been a finalist for an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award and a two-time finalist for a Livingston Award. He lives in San Francisco, CA.