Product Description

We suffer today from food anxiety, bombarded as we are with confusing messages about how to eat an ethical diet. Should we eat locally? Is organic really better for the environment? Can genetically modified foods be good for you?

JUST FOOD does for fresh food what Fast Food Nation (Houghton Mifflin, 2001) did for fast food, challenging conventional views, and cutting through layers of myth and misinformation. For instance, an imported tomato is more energy-efficient than a local greenhouse-grown tomato. And farm-raised freshwater fish may soon be the most sustainable source of protein.

Informative and surprising, JUST FOOD tells us how to decide what to eat, and how our choices can help save the planet and feed the world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14650 in Books
• Published on: 2009-08-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 272 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780316033749
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"McWilliams has guts. Some of the changes he champions will draw fire from all quarters...but he also presents ideas that may appeal to both the greenerati and capitalistas...McWilliams forgoes sloganeering in favor of measured logic, but he doesn't downplay the notion that a worldwide food crisis is imminent and that we had better fix things. Soon." (Texas Monthly Mike Shea )

"McWilliams presents some appealing alternatives to the views of both the agrarian romantics on the left and the agribusiness capitalists on the right. The author advocates a judicious use of genetically engineered seeds and food products, believes we must reduce our passion for land-animal protein...and urges more attention to the nascent science of aquaponics...He concludes that the best food-production model may be "a broad pattern of regionally integrated, technologically advanced, middle-sized farms." Rich in research, provocative in conception and nettlesome to both the right and the left." (Kirkus Reviews )

"Enlightening....James E. McWilliams is stirring up trouble, the kind that gets noticed-and the kind that makes us all scratch our heads and think harder....Just Food ultimately offers a brave, solid argument that anyone who cares about their food-and everyone should care about their food-should consider." (Atlanta Journal-Constitution Meridith Ford Goldman )

PRAISE FOR A REVOLUTION IN EATING:

"Fascinating....Anyone curious about the cultural history of that meatloaf on the dinner plate will gobble it up." (Entertainment Weekly Tina Jordan )

"The lucid style and jaunty tone....make this accessible to all." (Publishers Weekly )

"McWilliams has penned an illuminating account of the evolution of foodways in the colonial Americas." (Washington Post Book World Josh Friedland )

"McWilliams's examination of the culinary history of Colonial America is more than a....gastronomic tour....A lively and informative read." (The New Yorker )

About the Author
James McWilliams is an associate professor of history at Texas State University. He was a fellow at Yale University's Agrarian Studies Program, and is the author of three previous books. He has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Customer Reviews

Elephants in the Garden
Just Foods is an important book in the continuing (and continually escalating) debate over how we should grow our food and what we should eat. Environmental historian and reformed locavore James McWilliams, invites us to think logically and dispassionately about some of the most important food issues of our time--and of the future. Having read two of McWilliams' previous books, I expected a controversial, detailed, and well-documented discussion. I wasn't disappointed.

In summary, McWilliams argues

1) that global food production is more fuel-efficient and more economically necessary (for developing countries that need export markets) than is local food production/consumption ("locovorism");
2) that organic farming is no more healthy for people and for the land than is "wisely practiced" conventional agriculture;
3) that genetically-modified crops, in the right hands, are not to be feared and are in fact necessary to feed the ten billions of people who will live on this planet by 2050;
4) that we must drastically reduce our production and consumption of meat animals and non-farmed fish;
5) and that we must get rid of "perverse" subsidies that undercut fair trade.

Informed readers will likely find themselves in near-total agreement with McWilliams' last two points. Factory-farmed beef consumes 33 calories of fossil fuel for every single calorie of meat produced, as well as creating huge amounts of air, soil, and water pollution and--on the other end--causing serious health problems in those who over-consume. Other animals, including range-farmed animals, may be less damaging to the environment and to their consumers, but still require (by a 3-to-1 ratio) more energy to produce than they offer in return. Wild fish stocks have been harvested to the brink of extinction, and ecologically-sensitive fish-farming may be our only alternative, short of giving up fish altogether. Many readers may agree with McWilliams that "conscientious eaters must radically reduce current rates of consumption" of meat and wild fish if the world's ecosystems are to be saved. Many will also agree that an end must be put to wasteful government incentives such as corn subsidies.

But those same informed readers will find much to argue with in this book, for McWilliams overlooks several hugely important problems--elephants in the garden. As I see them, here they are.

The first elephant: fossil-fuel depletion. While I am sympathetic to McWilliams' arguments that we need to be sensible about "food miles" and make more effort to save energy in food selection and preparation, I feel that he has overlooked one of the most important argument against continuing and/or increasing our dependency on global food markets and conventional fossil-fueled agriculture: that over the next decade or two, oil will become so expensive that food will no longer be shipped halfway around the world. Conventional farming, with its reliance on fossil-fueled equipment, fertilizers, and insecticide, is not viable in the long term. Even the conservative International Energy Agency (IEA) now says that "peak oil" is likely to arrive by 2020 and bring with it skyrocketing fuel costs. Whether we like it or not, when the price of a gallon of gasoline hits double-digits, shortening the food miles from farm to fork may be a necessity. Indeed, many of us may be eating out of our front-yard gardens, raising chickens in the back, and purchasing shares in a neighborhood milk goat. Don't laugh. It's possible.

A second elephant. I would like to accept McWilliams' argument that we must make a kind of peace with biotechnology, and that genetically-modified crops may be important when it comes to feeding fast-growing human populations across the globe--populations that (he says) are on track to exceed the carrying-capacity of the planet. We need the promise of higher yields, drought tolerance, and pest-resistance. But McWilliams brushes aside too easily the huge issues of gene contamination; the failure of GM crops to reduce (as promised) pesticide use; and their failure to produce the promised higher yields. And since GM crops are conventionally-farmed, the challenge of energy depletion must be faced here, too.

Still, it is not the flawed promise of GM crops that will most concern readers. It is the question of private ownership of the world's seeds. McWilliams himself acknowledges that the only place for biotechnology is "the public domain," and that as long as the genes of the world's most important foods are owned and controlled by a "handful of corporations intent on monopolizing patents in the interest of profit," none of its benefits will be achieved.

But that is the elephant. These technologies do not belong to the commons. They are held by monopolistic private corporations. And short of a revolution, corporations will continue to hold them. And as long as this is true, biotechnology is a much greater threat than a promise to the food security of peoples around the world.

A third elephant. Any book that presumes to point definitive directions for global agriculture absolutely must take into account the enormous cloud that looms on all horizons: global warming and climate change. McWilliams addresses this far too briefly. Under changing climate conditions, what kinds of foods will we be able to produce and where? How are these changes likely to affect pests and crop-destroying viruses? Global warming, fossil-fuel depletion, and privately owned crops are the huge elephants in the garden. That these issues are not front-and-center in this book is a substantial disappointment.

As always, I am grateful to James McWilliams for requiring me to read carefully and think about his arguments. While I read, I scribbled in the margin, made notes on the flyleaf, and ticked off the sources I intend to investigate. Just Food engaged me fully and completely--not always comfortably, but always productively.

The bottom line. Just read Just Food. Give yourself time to read (this is not skim-reading stuff) and equip yourself with pencil and paper or your laptop. Bring your own arguments to the table, and measure them against the author's, point by point. And do plan to spend more than a few hours reading and thinking and arguing with this book. You will find that it is time well spent.

The Cynic's Dilemma
This book was a disappointment. Knowing of the author's keen intellect and captivating style, I was eagerly anticipating a set of challenging arguments to engage with. Like McWilliams, I have myself been a participant in the new food movement, but, also like him, I am aware that there are many complex factors that complicate simple rules of thumbs such as "eat local" and "organic is always better."

Unfortunately, there are too many inconsistencies, retailing of old canards as if they were surprising new facts, and an embarrassing lack of critical analysis of technoscientific hype.

For inconsistency, let me just detail one especially glaring contradiction. The general theme of the book is supposed to be that we have to find a "golden mean"--that is, to make sustainable eating more practical and acceptable to the world at large, we need to steer between the extremes of the local, organic purists and the conventional food system. Yet in the middle of the book we learn that by far the most important thing people can do to eat more sustainably is to give up eating meat. Now, in principle I tend to agree with McWilliams on this point, though I am a bit more positive about the grassfed and free-range meat alternatives than he is. But how in the world can you pass this off as advocating a moderate or "golden mean" position? In fact, McWilliams is something of an extremist on the meat issue--and for good reason, though, as I've said, he could afford to rethink his dismissal of the arguments in favor of grazing animals. (At one point, he glibly dismisses the objection that some land is only suitable for animal grazing by strangely contending that the land could grow plant crops if only it weren't so degraded by the hooves of cattle. For an environmental historian, this position seems willfully ignorant of the actual environmental history of places like the Great Plains.)

I do agree it seems justifiable to take a fairly extreme position on the meat issue, especially meat that is raised conventionally, if estimates of its contribution to climate change, water usage, etc., are any indication. But anyone who believes that it will represent some sort of moderate, practical, "golden mean" approach to convince Americans, and other folks in developed countries--not to mention developing-country aspirants to this lifestyle--to give up meat is kidding himself. This would be a major tectonic cultural shift not all that different, and probably even more unlikely, than the conversion to local, organic eating that McWilliams derides as unrealistic for the global masses. We may in practice achieve global reductions in meat consumption because of rising costs of production due to energy shortages, but (as one previous reviewer has pointed out), this is itself ironically a huge blind spot in McWilliams's analysis and one that significantly undercuts many of the other points he makes in the book regarding such things as global food trade and fertilizer inputs.

Next, McWilliams may have previously immersed himself in the Austin new food movement so much that he didn't notice, but many of the claims he makes--that organic food cannot feed the world, that genetic engineering is not significantly different from the long history of human plant and animal breeding, that genetically modified crops will save the world from starvation and pesticide use, etc.--have been bouncing around as conventional boilerplate for decades. I've been reading the debates and commentaries for many years now, and what has impressed me is how shaky these assumptions have become (or have always been). Yet they seem uncomfortably central to McWilliams's arguments. True, there are some valid and less worn-out points in the book too, but they are regrettably mixed in with too many of these shaky generalizations. Related to this, McWilliams seems mesmerized in many places by the pronouncements of molecular biologists, technology promoters, and the like. He does not dig deep enough and scrutinize them critically enough. He is too good a historian to ignore the long history of technoscientific hype and the promises that have not come to fruition.

As I've hinted, there are some good points in this book. Transportation from producer to consumer--the popular concept of "food miles," which McWilliams repeatedly derides--is indeed proving to be only one small component of the environmental footprint of the food system. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is certainly a valuable and often enlightening corrective to our initial assumptions. Yet even in discussing this issue, McWilliams falls prey to weak argumentation. It may well be true that local food *could* be less sustainable, for example when it uses fossil-fueled greenhouses, or when farmers markets are considerably further away from consumers than supermarkets, or when local production practices are less ideal than more distant ones. But does McWilliams have any evidence that this *is* the case, on average?

Sure, there are well-documented examples of long-distance food being arguably more sustainable than local, such as when produce is shipped by train from warmer to colder climates in the off season, or when Britons dine on shipped New Zealand grazed meat instead of grain-fed local meat. On the whole, however, my suspicion is just the opposite of McWilliams: I suspect that local producers more often tend to use more sustainable practices. (Would local farmers even consider using air freight to get their products to market?) As farmers markets reclaim town centers, I also suspect that customers may often be driving less to get there--maybe even walking or bicycling?--than if they were traveling to big pedestrian-unfriendly supermarkets on the edge of town. These observations are definitely true where I live. But we have no systematic data on this point--we have only my hunch and anecdotal experience against McWilliams's. The problem we have here is that McWilliams has jumped from the existence of exceptions to the conventional wisdom ("buy local") to rejecting the conventional wisdom. But sometimes exceptions are just that: exceptions. No one who is advocating a "golden mean" and practical solutions for the masses has any business rejecting rules of thumb that make sense for lots of food consumers, on such a slender base of evidence.

The same is true of his discussion of the problems of organic production. At first, he informs us that critiquing the scaling up, or "industrialization," of organics is a "red herring" (p. 55). Then a few pages later we find him excoriating organic farming's heavy use of allowable external inputs brought in from far away that may be as bad or worse than synthetic inputs forbidden by organic regulations. Yet, in my experience and reading of studies on this subject, the "big organic" producers are often the leading users of such inputs, while the small organic farmers near where I live use them far less frequently. Indeed, many small, local producers are rejecting the organic label--co-opted by "big organic" to focus solely on allowable vs. non-allowable inputs--and instead choosing to follow a more thorough and holistic set of agro-ecological production practices. I suppose McWilliams would probably deride these folks as impractical "purists," but then it seems ironic that he is using the sins of their less pure competitors to cast doubt on the whole movement. Here again, we need to study this issue more fully before someone like McWilliams can so confidently minimize the sustainability of organics.

On the whole, I think the sloppiness and lack of systematic analysis undermine this book. There are many thoughtful nuggets, such as the need for full life-cycle analysis of the food system and the overriding importance of meat consumption. If nothing else, these nuggets of wisdom may spur some dedicated sustainable food advocates to elevate these issues to greater prominence. But they tend to remain just that: nuggets, rather than a carefully constructed and constructive critique of the assumptions of the new food movement. (On a related note, I was also disappointed that the wonderful double entendre in the title was not followed up more thoroughly with a critical analysis of the injustices in the larger social and economic system, which is what the title led me to expect. He gets to that towards the end, but it seems too little and too late.) Unfortunately the valuable nuggets are needlessly obscured by the author's relentless, cynical posturing and inconsistent argumentation. In the end, the book reads as one person's chronicle of how he started to have doubts about his enthusiasm for eating local, organic food. A more disciplined analysis with greater gestation time might have produced a more consistent and balanced (and less strident) book.

An overstated corrective?
McWilliams's _Just Food_ is an important addition to the recent explosion of literature advocating for extensive or radical changes to current food systems. If nothing else it ought to help introduce to a much wider readership some of the more complex and nuanced discussions of reformist critiques that usually remain buried in academic journals and scientific studies. I think this is important because it seems that many well-intentioned advocates for change in food systems (consumers and producers alike) remain overly enamored by the simplistic categories ("local vs global") and arguments ("organic is always better") that circulate everywhere from the popular press and journalistic literature to blogs and promotional flyers at farmer's markets. Readers who have not yet grappled with many of the complexities surrounding such issues as genetically modified crops or the raising of food animals (on land or in water) or food miles may very well get their first introduction to some of those complexities here.

After one reading I am left worried about the following:

Not only are the particular issues discussed complex (as McWilliams argues so well), but so is radical change of social and economic systems. I completely agree with McWilliams that we need to evaluate rationally the risks of, say, GMOs from a scientific perspective and not only in terms of how they currently work in a socio-economic system supporting things like seed patents and monocultures. However, the two can only be separated in theory at this juncture of history. Unless there is fundamental change in these other aspects of the agricultural and legal landscape, perhaps the risks of GMOs remain much higher than he suggests. For me the salient pragmatic question is: What are the relative risks of GMOs in a world charactrized by socio-economic systems that support monocultures, seed patents, etc. (and in spite of so much rational evidence that these are problematic)? I grant that McWilliams doesn't claim that he has dealt with every complexity to arrive at a final and absolute solution. But I worry that he overstates his case for the particular solutions he offers because he fails to elaborate on ways that predominant socio-economic structures will likely "contaminate" how attempting such solutions will likely play out, unless accompanied by more radical forms of socio-economic change.

This leads me to a larger concern perhaps in the same general category. It appears that the premise of the book is that the earth's population is already, or is soon to become, really really huge--and that this is why it is imperative we become more pragmatic about food systems reform or revolution, which entails becoming more nuanced (less bumperstickerish) and more reasonable and pragmatic (less romantic) in our thinking about the kinds of changes that are needed. Yet, the kinds of solutions he proposes are--as he oddly hints along the way--not exactly very likely to be accomplished given the way things work in the world today. So if McWilliams's proposed solutions are anything but easy or likely, why not also consider other viable albeit difficult and unlikely solutions that don't require his assumptions, say, about population? For example: What about reconfiguring socio-economic systems in order to encourage a reduction in the future population? Hard to accomplish? Sure. But is it really any less "pragmatic" than trying to convince most people to stop eating meat?

All this makes me wonder about the possibility of a post-romantic, globally interconnected but also strongly "re-localized" food system that isn't so far out of line with much (but not all) of what many "locavores" and proponents of small-scale sustainable organic agriculture seemingly advocate. Yes, such a system would need to come to terms with exactly the kinds of environmental impact questions that McWilliams raises. Yes, it would need to abandon its localisms and local identity politics. Yes, it would need to move away from the commodification of terroir and any dogmatic resistance to non-local trade, etc. But is a reduction in population combined with more sustainable (albeit sometimes less productive) forms of smaller-scale agriculture and food production, happening together with (and even helping to bring about) a radical reconfiguration of our socio-economic organization and "lifestyles" any less possible or pragmatic than what McWilliams is offering? It may very well be, but McWilliams's approach makes it difficult to consider the relative merits.

In effect, I worry that McWilliams, too, has thrown out the baby with the bathwater by overemphasizing the oversimplifications and romanticism of certain strands of "eating local" and "small"-scale farming without considering how these might fit into the landscape of an alternative future wherein the social structures and population projections that make sense to us today no longer hold---a future which might, somewhat unwittingly and unpredictably, be helped along by the existence of a generation or two with a small but significant cadre of those who get into smaller-scale farming and of consumers who become enraptured with buying food directly from farmers. This might be far-fetched, but I am left wondering--without believing that I have the answer--if it is any more far-fetched than hoping enough of us will "think critically [enough] about food" that we somehow manage to operationalize the kinds of solutions McWilliams recommends, before it is too late.

At any rate, I am truly curious as to how McWilliams's timely contribution will affect current public debates about food and agriculture.