Product Description

Skyrocketing food prices, escalating levels of obesity, and worrisome threats to farm and fish harvests from global warming and climate chaos are making food stories headline news around the world. No Nonsense Guide to World Food, written by Dr. Wayne Roberts, a leading public health policy analyst and organizer, analyzes the 60-year evolution of a global "cheap food system," and traces today's emerging food crisis to decades of severing the natural links connecting food to human, environmental, and social health.

This is the first popular book to analyze food problems as part of an overall food system. It's also a happy find among contemporary food books: written with wit and zest, packed with on-the-spot reports of heartwarming experiments around the world, and loaded with hopeful and doable proposals based on the author's years of experience as a professional food organizer with Toronto Public Health, the leading city public health unit in North America.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #780534 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781904456964
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"Couldn't be more timely, especially given the great deal of rubbish being served to a public hungry for answers about their food ... a powerful book." -- Raj Patel, author of Starved & Stuffed: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System

From the Publisher
Winner of the 2008 Eco-Hero Award (Planet in Focus)

From the Inside Flap

"As globalization obscures locality of ecosystems and communities with brands and logos, the best way to recognize our true nature and needs is food... What species do we consume, where, how and by whom were they reared and harvested, what was the ecological footprint of the food? Books like this get us started in our thinking and our actions."--David Suzuki

"Life-enhancing! Unlike most academic books on food, [this] is highly readable."--Kevin Morgan, Professor, School of City & Regional Planning, Cardiff University

"In this era of global fear, Eduardo Galeano warns, one portion of humanity fears it will suffer from hunger, while others fear they will suffer from food. Millions of people suffer from a food price `crisis,' even after the biggest harvest in history. Yet even those with money for all the food they could ever want still have to worry about the kind of poisons that come with their food. This timely and enlightening book offers effective remedies to such predicaments. To name the intolerable is itself an act of hope."--Gustavo Esteva, Zapatista advisor, negotiator and visionary, co-inventor of the of the Mexican resistance slogan: "no corn, no country", author of the classic Grassroots Post-Modernism

"Wayne Roberts really gets that you must have a diversified food system with the combination of local production, practical policy, and deep analysis. He gets the message out with a great sense of humor."--Will Allen, Growing Power, Milwaukee

"With a voice I admire-clear, playful, and passionate all at the same time-Wayne Roberts weaves through an analysis that is both historically andgeographically sweeping, fascinating personal encounters in countries as diverse as Brazil, India, South Korea, the United States, and Canada--his homeland. The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food is eminently readable...and should be useful to both general and specialized audiences interested in food system issues. Planners especially will resonate with the book's call for the need to correct the many kinds of market failure created by modernist food systems; they will also appreciate the diverse models of practice it illustrates."--Kami Pothukuchi, Associate Professor of Urban Planning, Wayne State University

"[A] lucid, readable account of the Modernist Food System and multifaceted efforts to transform it. This is a superb introduction to the unfolding contradictions of food and farming since World War II. Its special strength is a clear vision of how myriad dandelions of sustainability and justice are widening the cracks in a dangerously rigid and homogenizing agrifood system."--Harriet Friedmann, Professor of Sociology and Fellow, Centre for International Studies, U of T

"This invaluable guide not only has a tough-minded analysis of what's wrong with our food system, but also inspiring, no-nonsense recommendations for action. Anyone involved in the many positive and exciting food campaigns going on in the world today will be energized by this book."--Jeanette Longfield (MBE), Coordinator, Sustain: The alliance for better food and farming (UK)

Customer Reviews

Exceptional guide to the world food crisis
This book is not only highly readable and witty, but also smart and essential for understanding our current culture in crisis. Highly recommended.