Recipe for America: Why Our Food System is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It |  | Author: Jill Richardson
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 62103
Media: Paperback
Pages: 224
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.4
ISBN: 0981504035
Dewey Decimal Number: 363.80973
EAN: 9780981504032
ASIN: 0981504035
Publication Date: July 1, 2009
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Product Description
“Jill Richardson is a fresh voice in the movement to create a healthier and sustainable food system. This book will be part of the burgeoning food social movement, as it provides a guide to the most important issues and how to work on them.”—Marion Nestle “Jill’s work at Daily Kos represents the best of the people-powered movement. It’s a pleasure to see her work reach a new plateau and come to the attention of a wider audience.”—Markos Moulitsas America’s food system is dominated by agribusiness and corporate farms, whose destructive practices pollute the environment, are cruel to animals, and offer us unhealthy food choices. Despite this dire situation, most people have little idea how to eat differently, or healthier. In Recipe for America, food activist Jill Richardson shows how sustainable agriculture—where local farms raise food that is healthy for consumers and animals and does not damage the environment—offers the only solution to America’s food crisis. In addition to highlighting the harmful conditions at factory farms, this timely and necessary book details the rising grassroots food movement, which is creating an agricultural system that allows people to eat sustainably, locally, and seasonally. A call to action for those who are concerned about what they eat and the health of the planet, Recipe for America shows how sustainable eating nourishes our bodies, our economy, and our environment, and how it is the best hope for the future of food in America. Jill Richardson blogs about food issues at Daily Kos and at her own blog, La Vida Locavore (http://www.lavidalocavore.org). She is also a member of the advisory board of the Organic Consumers Association.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
Review from Civil Eats July 23, 2009
Rui Jie (Wisconsin)
13 out of 15 found this review helpful
[...]
With Recipe for America, Sustainable Food Advocate Jill Richardson Invites You to Join the Cause
July 15th, 2009 By Paula Crossfield
Americans are more obese than ever, our current agriculture system is dependent on oil and other limited resources, our waterways and air are polluted by factory-like farming operations, and still opponents try to push sustainable agriculture to the margins. But change is possible, as Jill Richardson writes in her new book, Recipe for America: Why Our Food System is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It, which breaks down many of the issues facing the food system and provides approximately 70 pages of solutions.
The book first sets out to explain the way our agriculture system devolved from sustainable to unsustainable. "In the end, the numerous problems in our food system -- pollution, human rights abuses, poor food safety, the breakdown of rural communities, the decline in our health -- are hardly random," she writes. "Instead, they stem from a common thread of industrialization, which occurred primarily over the second half of the twentieth century."
The logical conclusion for Richardson, then, is that sustainable agriculture is the only way forward. In the next chapter, she details the reasons why sustainable agriculture works -- beginning with the inherent consideration it provides to the common good, by maintaining the land, the air, and other species for future generations. She spends time talking about the science of building fertile soil, a necessary part of the practice of sustainable agriculture, as well as the importance of biodiversity, which creates stability in the populations of neighboring plants and organisms. She makes it clear that these considerations are being left out of current conventional agriculture, which purports that we can indefinitely add fertilizer to fields instead of building topsoil (we can't; a crucial element, phosphorus, which can be maintained in topsoil, is now most often being irrevocably washed away every growing season through bad agricultural practices). Building up soil is scientific, involving laboratory samples and methodology, not some turn back to the past, Richardson asserts. This method also saves the farmer money while promoting the environment; and without doing such, we face a future inability to feed ourselves.
So what then is standing in the way of implementation of sustainable practices? Here, it seems, most often the barriers to building a sustainable food system come down to the political will to change. Richardson goes into detail about the barriers on the micro level, in restaurants and school cafeterias, for example. But most interesting are the barriers on the farm, and how excessive regulation on the macro level (like the pending National Animal Identification System (NAIS)), and incentives that promote industrial agricultural practices over sustainable, affect farmers' will and ability to change. But the greatest barrier of all, she writes, may be the lack of recognition on the part of the government that sustainable agriculture practices are superior to industrial agriculture, and for that to change, we need public outcry.
Richardson focuses the final third of her book on the feasible, incremental solutions that will begin to stem the tide of industrial agriculture and favor improved, more sustainable practices. She starts with big ideas, like protecting children, food safety, human and animal rights and the value of labeling, then zeros in on the policy initiatives and problems facing improvements in those areas.
Food safety, for example, is the cause that has been getting a lot of focus in Washington. Here Richardson goes into detail about some of the major issues facing food safety, like antibiotic resistance, microbial contamination, and mercury in fish, and gives specific recommendations for change that can be achieved right now. For mercury in fish, for example, she calls on the government to change its lax warnings to reflect more accurate information about what is safe, then to place labels and warnings where consumers are likely to see them, and finally to significantly curb mercury pollution. She links the problems in keeping our food safe nationally primarily to the "piecemeal" way in which our food safety system has been set up. In addition, the USDA's conflict of interest in simultaneously being charged with promoting and regulating industry (usually more of the former than the latter), and a chronically under-funded FDA (the body charged with making sure our food is safe) leaves Richardson wondering if all those campaign contributions from Big Ag and Big Pharma are keeping regulation in check.
Like a handbook for the sustainable advocate in training, Recipe for America feels like a one-on-one session with a pro in the trenches. It gives the reader the tools they need to be up-to-date on the state of the food movement, the pending legislation and state of the political process as it pertains to food. So pick up a copy, and join the ranks. The good food movement needs YOU!
Recipe For Better Food and Better Health for Our Future August 5, 2009
Sherilin R. Heise (San Diego, CA USA)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
Jill Richardson's new book shares her personal journey of discovery and her path to explore solutions. Since our health problems are caused by our diet it makes sense that the solution will be changes in our diet, rather than another blockbuster pharmaceutical with unintended side-effects. High fructose corn syrup has captured an immense market share of our processed food and lurks as a likely cause of overcomsumption of simple carbohydrates, known to be a direct cause of putting on extra pounds. Fructose is the most lipogeneic of all the sugars. I share some of Jill's experiences. I, too, worked in Washington, D.C. also living without a car, and doing my shopping by Metro, bus, bike and walking. I also had a daily routine of eating ice cream, especially in the hot summers, and quickly gained a lot of weight. Jill reveals her personal struggles (and America's issues) and she does it very well. The book is easy to understand and well written. She offers a broad array of action strategies from an interesting perpective. Any community food organizer would benefit from reading Jill's book. -Sherilin Heise, San Diego
A Voice FOR the Wilderness July 23, 2009
Timothy Smith (Cleveland, Ohio)
9 out of 11 found this review helpful
Recipe for America: Why Our Food System is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It
Jill Richardson's new book is a must-read for anyone who puts food into their mouth. She daringly takes on Agribiz and all it entails (genetic modification, CAFOs, ecological damage and ridiculously inefficient petroleum-based fertilizers) and counters their claims with evidence that high-yield, sustainable organic methods are not only possible, but absolutely essential if we are to solve the problems of hunger and malnutrition worldwide. You won't look at your plate the same way after reading Recipe For America -- and your food is going to taste a whole lot better afterward too.
Review from an interested American food consumer August 2, 2009
J. D. Savage (Dallas)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Jill Richardson's new book, Recipe for America, is a must read for any American who eats.
She skillfully explains the issues with modern industrialized farming in a way that is much more understandable than most written accounts or documentaries that I've read or seen. Her explanation of sustainable farming was excellent and well researched. Her personal examples of how she came to make this topic her life's work were so easily readable and helped pull me in to the book. Her descriptions of the wide array of local foods she has dicsovered in farmers markets and local restaurants made my mouth water. Her book hit home with me in a way no other publication on the topic has so far and moved me to begin seeking local alternatives for produce such as farmers markets and CSAs.
Americans need to better undarstand how our food affects our daily lives and how large scale industrialized farming has altered this crucial and basic part of human existence in this country and others. Ms. Richardson's book makes this complex topic as understandable as possible and provides many actions that individuals can readily perform to make their food choices better. Two thumbs up for Recipe for America!
A one-stop shop for addressing many of the problems with the American food system August 7, 2009
I. Miller
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Jill Richardson is a young, new author, but her work in Recipe for America comes across as an experienced, well-read and savvy author. Jill does a great job demystifying the political and economic influences and systems built around America's food system. Unlike other authors, she is so bold as propose complete and viable solutions to the problems facing our society's relationships with food and health. It's clear that Jill speaks from the progressive voice of American politics, but food security and safety is something that anyone with children (or anyone that eats for that matter) can get behind.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 11
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