Food Economics

Uncommon Grounds tells the story of coffee from its discovery on a hill in ancient Abyssinia to the advent of Starbucks. In this updated edition of the classic work, Mark Pendergrast reviews the dramatic changes in coffee culture over the past decade, from the disastrous "Coffee Crisis" that caused global prices to plummet to the rise of the Fair Trade movement and the "third-wave" of quality-obsessed coffee connoisseurs.

How much do you know about the meat on your dinner plate? Journalist Christopher Leonard spent more than a decade covering the country's biggest meat companies, including four years as the national agribusiness reporter for the Associated Press. Now he delivers the first comprehensive look inside the industrial meat system, exposing how a handful of companies executed an audacious corporate takeover of the nation's meat supply.

Often blamed for the rising rates of obesity and diabetes among black Americans, fast food restaurants like McDonald's have long symbolized capitalism's villainous effects on our nation's most vulnerable communities. But how did fast food restaurants so thoroughly saturate black neighborhoods in the first place? In Franchise, acclaimed historian Marcia Chatelain uncovers a surprising history of cooperation among fast food companies, black capitalists, and civil rights leaders, who believed they found an economic answer to the problem of racial inequality.

How much of our daily caloric intake comes from ingesting substances that, technically speaking, do not meet traditional definitions of “food”? Chances are, if you’re eating something that came wrapped in plastic and contains a funky ingredient you don’t have in your kitchen, it's most likely—almost definitely—ultra-processed food, or UPF.

For decades, a single free market philosophy has dominated global economics. But this is bland and unhealthy—like British food in the 1980s, when best-selling author and economist Ha-Joon Chang first arrived in the UK from South Korea. Just as eating a wide range of cuisines contributes to a more interesting and balanced diet, so, too, is it essential we listen to a variety of economic perspectives. In Edible Economics, Chang makes challenging economic ideas more palatable by plating them alongside stories about food from around the world.

When Lynsi Snyder’s grandparents founded In-N-Out Burger in 1948, they built it with a passion for quality and service that Lynsi embraced at a young age. After starting as a store associate at age seventeen, she then worked in other departments, gaining firsthand experience with almost every aspect of the family business until she became president in 2010. She has led the company through explosive growth—today, there are three-hundred-ninety-two stores and counting—and is deeply committed to the well-being of the In-N-Out Burger family.

Monsanto, a St. Louis chemical firm that became the world’s largest maker of genetically engineered seeds, merged with German pharma-biotech giant Bayer in 2018 - but its Roundup Ready® seeds, introduced 25 years ago, are still reshaping the farms that feed us. When researchers found trace amounts of the firm’s blockbuster herbicide in breakfast cereal bowls, Monsanto faced public outcry. Award-winning historian Bartow J. Elmore shows how the Roundup story is just one of the troubling threads of Monsanto’s past, many told here and woven together for the first time.

A pioneering urban farmer and MacArthur "Genius Award" winner points the way to building a new food system that can feed - and heal - broken communities. An eco-classic in the making, The Good Food Revolution is the story of Will's personal journey, the lives he has touched, and a grassroots movement that is changing the way our nation eats.

Food is a conduit for connection; we envision smiling families gathered around a table-eating, happy, content. But what happens when poverty, mental illness, homelessness, and addiction claim a seat at that table? In The Meth Lunches, Kim Foster peers behind the polished visions of perfectly curated dinners and charming families to reveal the complex reality when poverty and food intersect.

Inequality in America manifests in many ways, but perhaps nowhere more than in how we eat. From her years of field research, sociologist and ethnographer Priya Fielding-Singh brings us into the kitchens of dozens of families from varied educational, economic, and ethnoracial backgrounds to explore how - and why - we eat the way we do. We get to know four families intimately: the Bakers, a Black family living below the federal poverty line; the Williamses, a working-class white family just above it; the Ortegas, a middle-class Latinx family; and the Cains, an affluent white family.

It chronicles the journey of how man moved from food capture to food production, being producers themselves and not just consumers for varying reasons and evolving along the way to more sustainable and advanced production practices; not leaving out challenges encountered as every good thing would. Makes us understand that farming ranges from crops and animals to other resources on a considerable portion of land, you can't take away real estate from farming. It documents the journey of Nigeria, which had been known as an agricultural sustained economy before the discovery of oil leading to ...

By explaining the lean system for identifying and eliminating waste and introducing efficiency in every aspect of the farm operation, The Lean Farm makes the case that small-scale farming can be an attractive career option for young people who are interested in growing food for their community. Working smarter, not harder, also prevents the kind of burnout that start-up farmers often encounter in the face of long, hard, backbreaking labor. Lean principles grew out of the Japanese automotive industry, but they are now being followed by progressive farms around the world....

Everyone knows how hard it can be to maintain a healthy diet. But what if some of the decisions we make about what to eat are beyond our control? Is it possible that food is addictive, like drugs or alcohol? And to what extent does the food industry know, or care, about these vulnerabilities? In Hooked, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Michael Moss sets out to answer these questions - and to find the true peril in our food.

Supermarket produce sections bulging with a year-round supply of perfectly round, bright red-orange tomatoes have become all but a national birthright. But in Tomatoland, which is based on his James Beard Award-winning article, The Price of Tomatoes, investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry. Fields are sprayed with more than one hundred different herbicides and pesticides. Tomatoes are picked hard and green and artificially gassed until their skins acquire a marketable hue.

The decade-long Great Depression, a period of shifts in the country's political and social landscape, forever changed the way America eats. Before 1929, America's relationship with food was defined by abundance. But the collapse of the economy, in both urban and rural America, left a quarter of all Americans out of work and undernourished - shattering long-held assumptions about the limitlessness of the national larder.

There once was a time when Black Americans up and down the socioeconomic ladder lived in and around the same neighborhoods. Part of this was a consequence of racially discriminatory federal, state, and city housing policies, such as exclusionary Federal Housing Authority practices and racially restrictive deeds and covenants, which prevented those who had the financial means from living anywhere else. Today, many of these neighborhoods are now centers of concentrated poverty.

Learn about Food Security with iMinds Money's insightful fast knowledge series. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation defines Food Security as a state when “all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”.

There is a major disconnect between what we wear and our knowledge of its impact on land, air, water, labor, and human health. Even those who value access to safe, local, nutritious food have largely overlooked the production of fiber, dyes, and the chemistry that forms the backbone of modern textile production. While humans are 100 percent reliant on their second skin, it’s common to think little about the biological and human cultural context from which our clothing derives.

On October 12, 2005, a massive fire broke out in the Wines Central wine warehouse in Vallejo, California. Within hours, the flames had destroyed 4.5 million bottles of California's finest wine worth more than $250 million, making it the largest destruction of wine in history. The fire had been deliberately set by a passionate oenophile named Mark Anderson, a skilled con man and thief with storage space at the warehouse who needed to cover his tracks.

Goose Island opened as a family-owned Chicago brewpub in the late 1980s, and it soon became one of the most inventive breweries in the world. In the golden age of light and cheap beers, John Hall and his son Greg brought European flavors to America. With distribution in two dozen states, two brewpubs and status as one of the twenty biggest breweries in the United States, Goose Island became an American success story and was a champion of craft beer. Then, on March 28, 2011, the Halls sold the brewery to Anheuser-Busch InBev, maker of Budweiser, the least craft-like beer imaginable.