Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal (paperback)
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The history of Homo sapiens is usually told as a story of technology, economics, or culture. Mark Bittman, author of the popular How to Cook Everything series, as well as New York Times bestsellers on diet and eating, argues that a more basic force is often overlooked: food.
Bittman lays out how the human drive to feed ourselves and the means we found to satisfy that need shaped our social structures, the development of our technologies, where we settled, and how we treated other creatures as well as other humans. The quest for food for growing populations drove exploration, colonialism, slavery, even capitalism.
The process continues, in Bittman’s view. As food production was industrialized, new styles of agriculture and food processing have altered not only the way we eat but the planet itself, with increasingly catastrophic results. There is, however, still time to change our outlook and the fate of our societies and the planet. If we act soon.
Hardcover.
Published on April 26, 2022
