Engineering the Farm offers a wide-ranging examination of the social and ethical issues surrounding the production and consumption of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), with leading thinkers and activists taking a broad theoretical approach to the subject. Topics covered include:the historical roots of the anti-biotechnology movementethical issues involved in introducing genetically altered cropsquestions of patenting and labelingthe...

Food makes philosophers of us all. Death does the same . . . but death comes only once . . . and choices about food come many times each day. In The Ethics of Food, Gregory E. Pence brings together a collection of voices who share the view that the ethics of genetically modified food is among the most pressing societal questions of our time. This comprehensive collection addresses a broad range of subjects, including the meaning of food, moral analyses of vegetarianism and starvation, the ...

Food, Inc. is guaranteed to shake up our perceptions of what we eat. This powerful documentary deconstructing the corporate food industry in America was hailed by Entertainment Weekly as "more than a terrific movie -- it's an important movie." Aided by expert commentators such as Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, the film poses questions such as: Where has my food come from, and who has processed it? What are the giant agribusinesses and what stake do they have in mainta...

The world has changed in the seventeen years since the controversial initial publication of Paul Hawken's Ecology of Commerce, a stirring treatise about the perceived antagonism between ecology and business. Yet Hawken's impassioned argument—that business both causes the most egregious abuses of the environment and, crucially, holds the most potential for solving our sustainability problems—is more relevant and resonant than ever.Containing updated and revised material for a new au...

An investigation of the massive agribusiness company, from a winner of the Rachel Carson Prize: "Well supported by wide-ranging scientific evidence." — Kirkus ReviewsThe result of a remarkable three-year-long investigation that took award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin across four continents, The World According to Monsanto tells the little-known yet shocking story of this agribusiness giant—the ...

As revealing as Freakonomics, shocking as Fast Food Nation and thought provoking as No Logo, The Politics of Breastfeeding exposes infant feeding as one of the most important public health issues of our time.Every thirty seconds a baby dies from infections due to a lack of breastfeeding and the use of bottles, artificial milks and other risky products. In her powerful book Gabrielle Palmer describes how big business uses subtle techniques to pressure parents to use alternatives to breastmi...

Paul Roberts, the best-selling author of The End of Oil, turns his attention to the modern food economy and finds that the system entrusted to meet our most basic need is failing.In this carefully researched, vivid narrative, Roberts lays out the stark economic realities behind modern food and shows how our system of making, marketing, and moving what we eat is growing less and less compatible with the billions of consumers that system was built to serve.At the heart of The...

To listen to most pundits and political writers, evolution, stem cells, and climate change are the only scientific issues worth mentioning -- and the only people who are anti-science are conservatives. Yet those on the left have numerous fallacies of their own. Aversion to clean energy programs, basic biological research, and even life-saving vaccines come naturally to many progressives. These are positions supported by little more than junk-science and paranoid thinking.Now for th...

Food safety is a matter of intense public concern, and for good reason. Millions of annual cases of food "poisonings" raise alarm not only about the food served in restaurants and fast-food outlets but also about foods bought in supermarkets. The introduction of genetically modified foods—immediately dubbed "Frankenfoods"—only adds to the general sense of unease. Finally, the events of September 11, 2001, heightened fears by exposing the vulnerability of food and water supplies to attacks ...

The exploding global consumption of meat is implicated in momentous but greatly underappreciated problems, and industrial livestock production is the driving force behind soaring demand.Following his previous ground-breaking book The Global Food Economy, Tony Weis explains clearly why the growth and industrialization of livestock production is a central part of the accelerating biophysical contradictions of industrial capitalist agriculture.The Ecological Hoofprint provides...

"A meticulously researched tour de force" on politics, big agriculture, and the need to go beyond farmers' markets to find fixes ( Publishers Weekly).Wenonah Hauter owns an organic family farm that provides healthy vegetables to hundreds of families as part of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement. Yet, as a leading healthy-food advocate, Hauter believes that the local food movement is not enough to solve America's food crisis and the public h...

For millennia, we lived in harmony with the Earth, taking only what we required to survive. But in just the past few centuries, we have used our powers to satisfy our obsession with consumption and new technology, without regard for the consequences. And in doing so, we have exploited our surroundings on an unprecedented scale. In this revised and updated edition of From Naked Ape to Superspecies, David Suzuki and Holly Dressel lucidly describe how we have evolved beyond our needs, trampli...