myfoodistry

In the 150 years since we discovered that microbes cause infectious diseases, we’ve battled to keep them at bay. But a recent explosion of scientific knowledge has led to undeniable evidence that early exposure to these organisms is beneficial to our children’s well-being. It turns out that our current emphasis on hyper-cleanliness and poor diets are taking a toll on our children’s lifelong health.

This engaging and important book explains how the millions of microbes that live in our bodies influence childhood development; why an imbalance in those microbes can lead to obesity, diabetes, and asthma, among other chronic conditions; and how–from conception on–parents can take concrete steps to positively impact their child’s long-term health. The authors delve into the role of microbes in everything from pregnancy nutrition and birthing methods to choices about feeding and lifestyle (“Should we have a pet?” “Should I give my child an antibiotic and a probiotic?” “Should I let him/her play with a friend who’s ill?”).

Based on the best scientific literature published to date —including the authors’ cutting-edge work— this book will change the way you view dirt and food, and empower you to give your kids a healthier start in life.

Authors: B.Brett Finlay & Marie Claire Arrieta

Authors’ website: http://letthemeatdirt.com/

“What you don’t understand about food and diet could fill a book. Biological anthropologist Stephen Le did just that, and what he has to say will almost certainly throw into question everything you think you know about healthy eating.”

– Randy Shore, the Vancouver Sun

“Le’s argument – taken as a whole and based on the myriad studies he cites – could constitute a paradigm shift regarding how we view food… leaves me hungry for more of his work.”

– Dilia Narduzzi, the Globe and Mail

I wrote this book to examine the human diet in its vast entirety, including the viewpoints of biology, culture, medicine, and history.

Stephen Le, Author

Warning: Shock and outrage will grip you as you dive into this one-of-a-kind expose. Shoddy science, sketchy politics and shady special interests have shaped American Dietary recommendations and destroyed our nation s health over recent decades. The phrase Death by Food Pyramid isn’t shock-value sensationalism, but the tragic consequence of simply doing what we have been told to do by our own government and giant food profiteers in pursuit of health.​

In “Death by Food Pyramid,” Denise Minger exposes the forces that overrode common sense and solid science to launch a pyramid phenomenon that bled far beyond US borders to taint the eating habits of the entire developed world.

Denise explores how generations of flawed pyramids and plates endure as part of the national consciousness, and how the one size fits all diet mentality these icons convey pushes us deeper into the throes of obesity and disease. Regardless of whether you re an omnivore or vegan, research junkie or science-phobe, health novice or seasoned dieter, “Death by Food Pyramid” will reframe your understanding of nutrition science, and inspire you to take your health, and future, into your own hands.”​

by Denise Minger

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In 2001, Fast Food Nation was published to critical acclaim and became an international bestseller. Eric Schlosser’s expose revealed how the fast food industry has altered the landscape of America, widened the gap between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and transformed food production throughout the world. The book changed the way millions of people think about what they eat and helped to launch today’s food movement.

In a new afterword for this edition, Schlosser discusses the growing interest in local and organic food, the continued exploitation of poor workers by the food industry, and the need to ensure that every American has access to good, healthy, affordable food.

Fast Food Nation is as relevant today as it was a decade ago. The book inspires readers to look beneath the surface of our food system, consider its impact on society and, most of all, think for themselves.

“Schlosser has a flair for dazzling scene-setting and an arsenal of startling facts . . . Fast Food Nation points the way but, to resurrect an old fast food slogan, the choice is yours.” — Los Angeles Times

​”As disturbing as it is irresistible . . . Exhaustively researched, frighteningly convincing . . . channeling the spirits of Upton Sinclair and Rachel Carson.”–San Francisco Chronicle​

“Schlosser shows how the fast food industry conquered both appetite and landscape.”–The New Yorker​

Eric Schlosser is a contributing editor for the Atlantic and the author of Fast Food Nation, Reefer Madness, and Chew on This (with Charles Wilson).

By Eric Schlosser

Reference

This richly illustrated book is the first to apply the discoveries of the new generation of food historians to the pleasures of dining and the culinary accomplishments of diverse civilizations, past and present.

Editor Paul Freedman has gathered essays by French, German, Belgian, American, and British historians to present a comprehensive, chronological history of taste from prehistory to the present day. The authors explore the early repertoire of sweet tastes; the distinctive contributions made by classical antiquity and China; the subtle, sophisticated, and varied group of food customs created by the Islamic civilizations of Iberia, the Arabian desert, Persia, and Byzantium; the magnificent cuisine of the Middle Ages, influenced by Rome and adapted from Islamic Spain, Africa, and the Middle East; the decisive break with highly spiced food traditions after the Renaissance and the new focus on primary ingredients and products from the New World; French cuisine’s rise to dominance in Europe and America; the evolution of modern restaurant dining, modern agriculture, and technological developments; and today’s tastes, which employ few rules and exhibit a glorious eclecticism. The result is the enthralling story not only of what sustains us but also of what makes us feel alive.​

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What should we have for dinner?

The question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but according to Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire, how we answer it today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species. Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Something organic? Or perhaps something we hunt, gather, or grow ourselves? The omnivore’s dilemma has returned with a vengeance, as the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous food landscape. What’s at stake in our eating choices is not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth.

In this groundbreaking book, one of America’s most fascinating, original, and elegant writers turns his own omnivorous mind to the seemingly straightforward question of what we should have for dinner. To find out, Pollan follows each of the food chains that sustain us—industrial food, organic or alternative food, and food we forage ourselves—from the source to a final meal, and in the process develops a definitive account of the American way of eating. His absorbing narrative takes us from Iowa cornfields to food-science laboratories, from feedlots and fast-food restaurants to organic farms and hunting grounds, always emphasizing our dynamic coevolutionary relationship with the handful of plant and animal species we depend on. Each time Pollan sits down to a meal, he deploys his unique blend of personal and investigative journalism to trace the origins of everything consumed, revealing what we unwittingly ingest and explaining how our taste for particular foods and flavors reflects our evolutionary inheritance.​

The surprising answers Pollan offers to the simple question posed by this book have profound political, economic, psychological, and even moral implications for all of us. Beautifully written and thrillingly argued, The Omnivore’s Dilemma promises to change the way we think about the politics and pleasure of eating. For anyone who reads it, dinner will never again look, or taste, quite the same.

By Michael Pollan

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Food. There’s plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?

Because most of what we’re consuming today is not food, and how we’re consuming it — in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone — is not really eating. Instead of food, we’re consuming “edible foodlike substances” — no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is what Michael Pollan calls the American paradox: The more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

But if real food — the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food — stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals.

Pollan proposes a new (and very old) answer to the question of what we should eat that comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. By urging us to once again eat food, he challenges the prevailing nutrient-by-nutrient approach — what he calls nutritionism — and proposes an alternative way of eating that is informed by the traditions and ecology of real, well-grown, unprocessed food. Our personal health, he argues, cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part.​

In Defense of Food shows us how, despite the daunting dietary landscape Americans confront in the modern supermarket, we can escape the Western diet and, by doing so, most of the chronic diseases that diet causes. We can relearn which foods are healthy, develop simple ways to moderate our appetites, and return eating to its proper context — out of the car and back to the table. Michael Pollan’s bracing and eloquent manifesto shows us how we can start making thoughtful food choices that will enrich our lives, enlarge our sense of what it means to be healthy, and bring pleasure back to eating.

Pollan’s last book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, launched a national conversation about the American way of eating; now In Defense of Food shows us how to change it, one meal at a time.​

By Michael Pollan

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‘A magnificent piece of popular history.’ Independent on Sunday.

ON CHRISTMAS DAY, 1616, an English adventurer, Nathaniel Courthope, stepped ashore on a remote island in the East Indies on a most secret and dangerous mission. He had to persuade the head-hunting islanders of Run to grant a monopoly to England over their nutmeg, a fabulously valuable spice in Europe.

The welcome he received infuriated the Dutch, who were determined to seize control of the world’s nutmeg supply. 

For five years, Courthope and his half-starved band of thirty men were besieged by a force one hundred times greater. His heroism set in motion the events that led to the founding of the greatest city on earth.

Drawn from original letters, journals and personal diaries, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg sheds light on an extraordinary and little-episode in world history. 

By Giles Milton

by Raj Patel

Half the world is malnourished, the other half obese—both symptoms of the corporate food monopoly.

To show how a few powerful distributors control the health of the entire world, Raj Patel conducts a global investigation, traveling from the “green deserts” of Brazil and protester-packed streets of South Korea to bankrupt Ugandan coffee farms and barren fields of India.

What he uncovers is shocking—the real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa, an epidemic of farmer suicides, and the false choices and conveniences in supermarkets.

Yet he also finds hope—in international resistance movements working to create a more democratic, sustainable, and joyful food system.

From seed to store to plate, Stuffed and Starved explains the steps to regain control of the global food economy, stop the exploitation of farmers and consumers, and rebalance global sustenance.

Author’s website, here.