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Feed the People!: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better
Why Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan, and other slow-food-loving locavores are wrong about food in America—and why Waffle House can save us all.
“This book is sustenance for your mind as it imagines more democratic and delightful ways we can all fill our stomachs.” —Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone
The food industry is a major driver of climate change, pollution, obesity, animal suffering, and workplace exploitation. Many food writers blame the industrial food system and tell individual eaters to fix these problems by buying local, artisanal food from small farmers—a solution most Americans can’t afford.
But, as food policy experts Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg remind us, modern technology has made food more affordable, abundant, varied, and tastier than at any other time in history. In Feed the People!, they argue that modern food pleasures like Waffle House waffles, and the industrial systems that make them possible, are actually good. With smart technology and commonsense policies, we can make them even better.
Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg have traveled around the United States to find the people changing the way we make and eat food, from the innovators behind plant-based burgers to the cooks serving free school lunches to the labor organizers unionizing fast food joints. They show that building a food system that works for everyone will take more than just eating your vegetables.
Feed the People! invites you to sit at the table and join this delicious movement.
“This book is sustenance for your mind as it imagines more democratic and delightful ways we can all fill our stomachs.” —Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone
The food industry is a major driver of climate change, pollution, obesity, animal suffering, and workplace exploitation. Many food writers blame the industrial food system and tell individual eaters to fix these problems by buying local, artisanal food from small farmers—a solution most Americans can’t afford.
But, as food policy experts Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel Rosenberg remind us, modern technology has made food more affordable, abundant, varied, and tastier than at any other time in history. In Feed the People!, they argue that modern food pleasures like Waffle House waffles, and the industrial systems that make them possible, are actually good. With smart technology and commonsense policies, we can make them even better.
Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg have traveled around the United States to find the people changing the way we make and eat food, from the innovators behind plant-based burgers to the cooks serving free school lunches to the labor organizers unionizing fast food joints. They show that building a food system that works for everyone will take more than just eating your vegetables.
Feed the People! invites you to sit at the table and join this delicious movement.
- GenresNonfictionEnvironment
246 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 17, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
November 15, 2025
This is all about the modern day food system, how it isn’t nearly as terrible as most people make it out to be, some of the actual problems with it, and how it could be fixed.
A lot of people that write about the food system today say it’s broken. Things actually work way better than people think it does. The book keeps coming back to the Waffle House waffle. The logistics involved in getting that waffle on your plate is quite mind boggling and the fact that it can even happen is kind of a miracle.
This book covered all aspects involved in getting that waffle to you, including farmers, food distribution systems, stores and markets, the people that work at all levels to get said food to you, and the laws making the system and the actual waffle safe for people.
This book is well researched and very easy to read. Looking into food systems can be difficult, with many companies refusing to disclose how they get their food, citing the safety of said system. Reading about it in here was deeply interesting. I agree with the author. Things aren’t as terrible as it’s made out to be. But there are things they need to be fixed (mostly involving pay and treatment of the people involved in the process) that needs to be fixed.
The downside of a book like this is that the people that most need to read it are the ones least likely to. I hold out the hope that some of them do though. Overall I highly recommend this for all readers.
A lot of people that write about the food system today say it’s broken. Things actually work way better than people think it does. The book keeps coming back to the Waffle House waffle. The logistics involved in getting that waffle on your plate is quite mind boggling and the fact that it can even happen is kind of a miracle.
This book covered all aspects involved in getting that waffle to you, including farmers, food distribution systems, stores and markets, the people that work at all levels to get said food to you, and the laws making the system and the actual waffle safe for people.
This book is well researched and very easy to read. Looking into food systems can be difficult, with many companies refusing to disclose how they get their food, citing the safety of said system. Reading about it in here was deeply interesting. I agree with the author. Things aren’t as terrible as it’s made out to be. But there are things they need to be fixed (mostly involving pay and treatment of the people involved in the process) that needs to be fixed.
The downside of a book like this is that the people that most need to read it are the ones least likely to. I hold out the hope that some of them do though. Overall I highly recommend this for all readers.
April 10, 2026
This was a very eye opening book about our current food production system and all that it’s given to us. It’s the only book thus far that seem to be combining the actual problems that are present within the food production at this moment and that provides realistic advice that can work on both a individual and collective level.
It touches on the same themes present in the secret life of groceries, mainly that our current food system only exists due to the very modern infrastructure that has been developed because of globalization and industrialization. Any movement away from that does a disservice to the expectations than an average American has about the food availability and continued access to food to the level that we have already known. And other system will be unlikely to succeed as it doesn’t provide the breath and availability to reach a population of several hundred million people.
I think one of the most poignant portions of the book was the topic of labor in food service. Similar to the secrets life of groceries, and something that I already had a feeling existed, but prefer to not know, what’s that our food system is carried on the backs unfairly treated laborers.
I think this book provides one of the greatest pieces of clarity of our modern food system.
It touches on the same themes present in the secret life of groceries, mainly that our current food system only exists due to the very modern infrastructure that has been developed because of globalization and industrialization. Any movement away from that does a disservice to the expectations than an average American has about the food availability and continued access to food to the level that we have already known. And other system will be unlikely to succeed as it doesn’t provide the breath and availability to reach a population of several hundred million people.
I think one of the most poignant portions of the book was the topic of labor in food service. Similar to the secrets life of groceries, and something that I already had a feeling existed, but prefer to not know, what’s that our food system is carried on the backs unfairly treated laborers.
I think this book provides one of the greatest pieces of clarity of our modern food system.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Food - Like Reading - Is Not Political, Despite Authors' Claims. I came into this book expecting a more science/ tech look at why industrial food is good (it is, and the authors are correct on this) and how it can be made better... and instead got a book focused almost entirely on the politics of the food industry and why the authors think that the small food/ farm to table crowd ala Michael Pollan and others is wrong. While I tend to agree with the authors in outcome, their reasoning here was extremely elitist and pro-totalitarian-government-intervention, with nearly every recommendation they make ultimately coming down to "government should dictate either specific actions or at worst the range of choices that businesses and consumers will have available to them".
Given that one of the authors works in NYC and the other in Europe, perhaps this is understandable cultural bias, and perhaps you, the reader of my review, will agree with their reasonings as well as their outcomes. But for myself, a former Libertarian Party official who tends to agree more with the writings of Ayn Rand and Lysander Spooner... yeah, there wasn't much here I could actually endorse myself. ;)
Ultimately, it isn't the specific direction they chose but the sheer fact that they considered these recommendations the only possible policies and did not even allow for the possibility of other possibilities that lost a star. I love finding texts that come from different perspectives, but I expect *any* nonfiction book to at least mention other potential views and why they are more easily dismissed in the views of the author(s), and this simply wasn't done here - making the overall text have at minimum an appearance of elitism. Again, your mileage will absolutely vary there, and I know people personally who will five star this book as among the most important food books you will ever read and people who will wish they could give this same book zero stars as utter trash that should never be read by anyone *for exactly the same reasonings* that I'm ultimately winding up in the middle of the road there.
Oh yeah, kind of gave away that there was another star deduction coming there, right? This is one long time readers of my reviews will be quite familiar with in my reviews of nonfiction books - the bibliography simply wasn't long enough, clocking in at just 10% of the overall text here. The applicability of the Sagan Standard ("extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence") is perhaps debatable given the ultimate discussions of this book, but even without applying Sagan, I've maintained for years that in my vast reading of even Advance Review Copy nonfiction books over the years, a bare minimum - by my later expanded standards - of roughly 15% documentation is needed to get this star, and as noted, that is actually expanded , as for many years I required a bare minimum of 20%. So yeah, 10% simply isn't going to cut it there.
Still, for all this, read this book. Seriously. You may want to defenestrate it because it openly embraces unions and calls for more of them. You may want to defenestrate it because it says openly and honestly that if we are going to provide meat for billions of people, industrialized animal farming is the only realistic way that is going to happen. But you should read it anyway, no matter your own political persuasions, because ultimately this *is* a pretty realistic book looking at exactly how we can feed the masses going forward, even if it is an extremely pro-government-mandate and anti-individual liberty view.
Oh, and I repeat the title, since the authors were so adamant in the opposing view: Food is **NOT** political.
Recommended.
Given that one of the authors works in NYC and the other in Europe, perhaps this is understandable cultural bias, and perhaps you, the reader of my review, will agree with their reasonings as well as their outcomes. But for myself, a former Libertarian Party official who tends to agree more with the writings of Ayn Rand and Lysander Spooner... yeah, there wasn't much here I could actually endorse myself. ;)
Ultimately, it isn't the specific direction they chose but the sheer fact that they considered these recommendations the only possible policies and did not even allow for the possibility of other possibilities that lost a star. I love finding texts that come from different perspectives, but I expect *any* nonfiction book to at least mention other potential views and why they are more easily dismissed in the views of the author(s), and this simply wasn't done here - making the overall text have at minimum an appearance of elitism. Again, your mileage will absolutely vary there, and I know people personally who will five star this book as among the most important food books you will ever read and people who will wish they could give this same book zero stars as utter trash that should never be read by anyone *for exactly the same reasonings* that I'm ultimately winding up in the middle of the road there.
Oh yeah, kind of gave away that there was another star deduction coming there, right? This is one long time readers of my reviews will be quite familiar with in my reviews of nonfiction books - the bibliography simply wasn't long enough, clocking in at just 10% of the overall text here. The applicability of the Sagan Standard ("extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence") is perhaps debatable given the ultimate discussions of this book, but even without applying Sagan, I've maintained for years that in my vast reading of even Advance Review Copy nonfiction books over the years, a bare minimum - by my later expanded standards - of roughly 15% documentation is needed to get this star, and as noted, that is actually expanded , as for many years I required a bare minimum of 20%. So yeah, 10% simply isn't going to cut it there.
Still, for all this, read this book. Seriously. You may want to defenestrate it because it openly embraces unions and calls for more of them. You may want to defenestrate it because it says openly and honestly that if we are going to provide meat for billions of people, industrialized animal farming is the only realistic way that is going to happen. But you should read it anyway, no matter your own political persuasions, because ultimately this *is* a pretty realistic book looking at exactly how we can feed the masses going forward, even if it is an extremely pro-government-mandate and anti-individual liberty view.
Oh, and I repeat the title, since the authors were so adamant in the opposing view: Food is **NOT** political.
Recommended.
March 2, 2026
Recommendations for reform of the dominant food system while recognizing and retaining its benefits. The authors start by critiquing what they see as Wendell Berry’s goal of a complete overthrow of large-scale industrial agriculture and a return to artisanal, local everything. They take Berry’s praise of peasant farming literally but argue all it offers is more work and more expensive food. This is the root, they believe, of an error that plagues much of modern food writing from Pollan to Bittmann to Lappe.
I disagree with this read of Berry, although I can understand it if your focus is “The Unsettling of America”. I think he is better seen as arguing for connection - between people, with God, and with the environment. While he does often suggest this is best achieved by commitment to practical agrarian work in a fixed place with a close community, there are other routes towards the same goal. I’d also argue that while slogans like “the food system is broken” is popular and unhelpful polemic, no-one really wants to dismantle the whole thing.
Indeed, when the authors move to their suggestions, they are remarkably similar to the types of progressive policies that Pollan and Bittman would prefer – less meat, more regulation, better conditions for workers. They are most interesting when their analysis leads them to argue against this consensus where they follow Laudan’s “Plea for Culinary Modernity” and ask for the best possible industrial food. They value industrial productivity, plant-based meats and are skeptical of the claims for urban farming and of the harms of ultraprocessed foods and food desserts. (It is interesting that while they are critical of the capacity of urban farms to usefully address food needs, they are passionate about their potential to benefit people’s lives by growing community. Exactly my read of Berry).
I would have liked to have seen the authors be more critical of the ideas they ultimately support. Their preferred solution to most issues of industrial capitalism is more regulation, and resistance to regulation is irresponsible self-interest on the part of wealthy companies and weakness on the part of the politicians. This is certainly true, but at the same time, regulation does impose real burdens, sometimes without clear benefits, and these often fall most heavily on smaller operators where they can be anti-competitive. Laws to discourage people doing the things they value, like eating less meat, have real political costs. The scientific certainty of an educated elite can easily be seen by the masses as simply their poorly disguised ideology. While much of what the authors call for is a stronger version of Obama-era progressivism, the reaction against it seems much more vivid in the politics of the second Trump administration.
Food is our everyday, visceral connection to the world around us, and it isn’t surprising that food issues easily become to connected to political issues in ways that other aspects of modern industrial capitalism don’t. The problem is that food has so many different values associated with it – the environment, labor, animal rights, labor issues, nutrition, and to name a handful – that it’s tempting to imagine a fantasy solution where there “good food” is good enough resolve them all together. By thinking more carefully about what might work and what might not, the authors have made a important contribution to the arguments about a productive food politics.
I disagree with this read of Berry, although I can understand it if your focus is “The Unsettling of America”. I think he is better seen as arguing for connection - between people, with God, and with the environment. While he does often suggest this is best achieved by commitment to practical agrarian work in a fixed place with a close community, there are other routes towards the same goal. I’d also argue that while slogans like “the food system is broken” is popular and unhelpful polemic, no-one really wants to dismantle the whole thing.
Indeed, when the authors move to their suggestions, they are remarkably similar to the types of progressive policies that Pollan and Bittman would prefer – less meat, more regulation, better conditions for workers. They are most interesting when their analysis leads them to argue against this consensus where they follow Laudan’s “Plea for Culinary Modernity” and ask for the best possible industrial food. They value industrial productivity, plant-based meats and are skeptical of the claims for urban farming and of the harms of ultraprocessed foods and food desserts. (It is interesting that while they are critical of the capacity of urban farms to usefully address food needs, they are passionate about their potential to benefit people’s lives by growing community. Exactly my read of Berry).
I would have liked to have seen the authors be more critical of the ideas they ultimately support. Their preferred solution to most issues of industrial capitalism is more regulation, and resistance to regulation is irresponsible self-interest on the part of wealthy companies and weakness on the part of the politicians. This is certainly true, but at the same time, regulation does impose real burdens, sometimes without clear benefits, and these often fall most heavily on smaller operators where they can be anti-competitive. Laws to discourage people doing the things they value, like eating less meat, have real political costs. The scientific certainty of an educated elite can easily be seen by the masses as simply their poorly disguised ideology. While much of what the authors call for is a stronger version of Obama-era progressivism, the reaction against it seems much more vivid in the politics of the second Trump administration.
Food is our everyday, visceral connection to the world around us, and it isn’t surprising that food issues easily become to connected to political issues in ways that other aspects of modern industrial capitalism don’t. The problem is that food has so many different values associated with it – the environment, labor, animal rights, labor issues, nutrition, and to name a handful – that it’s tempting to imagine a fantasy solution where there “good food” is good enough resolve them all together. By thinking more carefully about what might work and what might not, the authors have made a important contribution to the arguments about a productive food politics.
March 11, 2026
Incredible book! Takes short-sighted foodies to task for overlooking issues of food availability, and gives a strong response to critiques of the food system as "broken." The authors also take issue with those who would insist that only locally sourced, small-scale farm-to-table food is worth celebrating, when this is not a realistic, cost-effective system for the vast majority of people.
The authors argue for "democratic hedonism," where we recognize the pleasures inherent in food and the amazing efficiencies of the food system, while advocating zealously for improvements on the margins, such as:
--Increased funding to SNAP and school lunches
--Increase the minimum wage to a livable wage, including restaurant and agricultural workers
--Eating less meat, especially less red meat
--Rewilding of cropland currently devoted to growing corn for animal feed and ethanol (grotesquely inefficient)
--Be wary of influencer diets that are not based in science and are hard to follow
--Don't use "ultra-processed food" as a demonizing pejorative, but more as a descriptive term that gives information while not making a food inherently evil
--Enjoy delicious food, even an occasional Waffle House waffle if that's your thing
--Celebrate the incredible efficiency of the modern food system, delivering vast quantities of safe, nutritious food over thousands of miles
--Rename the USDA as "The Department of Food" so that it spends much more time/energy on SNAP & school lunches and no time protecting the profits of big agribusiness
The authors argue for "democratic hedonism," where we recognize the pleasures inherent in food and the amazing efficiencies of the food system, while advocating zealously for improvements on the margins, such as:
--Increased funding to SNAP and school lunches
--Increase the minimum wage to a livable wage, including restaurant and agricultural workers
--Eating less meat, especially less red meat
--Rewilding of cropland currently devoted to growing corn for animal feed and ethanol (grotesquely inefficient)
--Be wary of influencer diets that are not based in science and are hard to follow
--Don't use "ultra-processed food" as a demonizing pejorative, but more as a descriptive term that gives information while not making a food inherently evil
--Enjoy delicious food, even an occasional Waffle House waffle if that's your thing
--Celebrate the incredible efficiency of the modern food system, delivering vast quantities of safe, nutritious food over thousands of miles
--Rename the USDA as "The Department of Food" so that it spends much more time/energy on SNAP & school lunches and no time protecting the profits of big agribusiness
April 7, 2026
A representative sample of the authors' political bias: They claim that "the conservative criticism [of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] is that food stamps are a bad idea in and of themselves because recipients should bear personal responsibility for their own hunger. This is both a morally bankrupt position and one that misses the basic economics of SNAP" (p. 131).
In their criticisms of Berry, Pollan, and Bittman, the authors seem aware of the fact that proposed solutions to problems in our food system need to be things that we could convince a broad segment of people to agree to. But they seem strangely blind to potential downsides of the solutions they propose, repeatedly asserting that anyone who thinks that their ideas could have negative consequences is simply wrong because "research has shown" that government interventions like the ones they propose are totally effective. They strongly and repeatedly imply that anyone who disagrees with their ideas is only doing so because they are selfish, greedy, and do not care about the welfare of others.
Any progressive who wants to convince people with more conservative leanings to adopt their proposed policies might consider this: claiming that anyone who opposes your ideas must simply be either stupid or evil is not a very effective tactic to get people to change their minds. This book would have been both more interesting and more convincing if the authors hadn't continually made the assumption that their point of view was so obviously correct as to not need serious argumentation.
In their criticisms of Berry, Pollan, and Bittman, the authors seem aware of the fact that proposed solutions to problems in our food system need to be things that we could convince a broad segment of people to agree to. But they seem strangely blind to potential downsides of the solutions they propose, repeatedly asserting that anyone who thinks that their ideas could have negative consequences is simply wrong because "research has shown" that government interventions like the ones they propose are totally effective. They strongly and repeatedly imply that anyone who disagrees with their ideas is only doing so because they are selfish, greedy, and do not care about the welfare of others.
Any progressive who wants to convince people with more conservative leanings to adopt their proposed policies might consider this: claiming that anyone who opposes your ideas must simply be either stupid or evil is not a very effective tactic to get people to change their minds. This book would have been both more interesting and more convincing if the authors hadn't continually made the assumption that their point of view was so obviously correct as to not need serious argumentation.
April 6, 2026
A very original and inspiring new book about the American food system.
Defending industrial food (even some of the ultra-processed ones!) may sound like a cheap provocation but these authors are serious and offer some serious arguments. They devote much space to a scathing critique of foodie writers like Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan, and while I loved Pollan books I have to admit that what Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg are pointing out often rings true. And they are not stopping at the critique, they also offer some interesting solutions - as they sum it up at one point, „A good, affordable diet for most consumers entails taking advantage of high-quality industrial foods, not shunning them”.
The book also enormously benefits from their conversational style and dry wit - just read this excerpt from their visit at a legendary fine-dining restaurant:
„One memorably catastrophic dish featured a piece of steamed Chinese broccoli entwined in a lonely, wan noodle. These listlessly rested in a puddle of a murky soy sauce concoction where someone had dusted them with shaved truffles. The one promising item on the plate—the noodle—was so miserly in its portioning that it felt downright hostile. The whole dish was completely overwhelmed by the truffles, which tasted more like an idea of luxury than luxury itself.”
Thanks to the publisher, Basic Books, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
Defending industrial food (even some of the ultra-processed ones!) may sound like a cheap provocation but these authors are serious and offer some serious arguments. They devote much space to a scathing critique of foodie writers like Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan, and while I loved Pollan books I have to admit that what Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg are pointing out often rings true. And they are not stopping at the critique, they also offer some interesting solutions - as they sum it up at one point, „A good, affordable diet for most consumers entails taking advantage of high-quality industrial foods, not shunning them”.
The book also enormously benefits from their conversational style and dry wit - just read this excerpt from their visit at a legendary fine-dining restaurant:
„One memorably catastrophic dish featured a piece of steamed Chinese broccoli entwined in a lonely, wan noodle. These listlessly rested in a puddle of a murky soy sauce concoction where someone had dusted them with shaved truffles. The one promising item on the plate—the noodle—was so miserly in its portioning that it felt downright hostile. The whole dish was completely overwhelmed by the truffles, which tasted more like an idea of luxury than luxury itself.”
Thanks to the publisher, Basic Books, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.
October 5, 2025
Thank you to NetGalley for providing this ARC.
This was a great books with lots of very good information.
It's written in an easy to read and approachable manner, I read the whole book in two days.
I already agreed with most of what the author's wrote about and I think that might be the biggest flaw of this book - I just don't know that people who don't already agree with everything in it will be at all tempted to pick it up. I'm not sure there's anything you can really do about that, it just makes me think "so what do I do about any if this?". Food discourse is so fraught and people are so entrenched in their opinions about it. A lot of what these authors want to achieve would require people to actually want change.
This was a great books with lots of very good information.
It's written in an easy to read and approachable manner, I read the whole book in two days.
I already agreed with most of what the author's wrote about and I think that might be the biggest flaw of this book - I just don't know that people who don't already agree with everything in it will be at all tempted to pick it up. I'm not sure there's anything you can really do about that, it just makes me think "so what do I do about any if this?". Food discourse is so fraught and people are so entrenched in their opinions about it. A lot of what these authors want to achieve would require people to actually want change.
May 2, 2026
A hugely important book for every citizen
The business of getting us all fed has interested me for years, and this is not the first book I have read on the subject. I wish I could say the prose here is sparkling and winsome, but alas, it is not. This is written by a couple of academics and the text trudges along. However, it reinforces the importance of our daily dietary choices for the quality of life of the rest of the natural world and the future of the planet. If I could choose what information is presented to high school students, I would include a streamlined version of the information in this book. Recommended with 4 stars.
The business of getting us all fed has interested me for years, and this is not the first book I have read on the subject. I wish I could say the prose here is sparkling and winsome, but alas, it is not. This is written by a couple of academics and the text trudges along. However, it reinforces the importance of our daily dietary choices for the quality of life of the rest of the natural world and the future of the planet. If I could choose what information is presented to high school students, I would include a streamlined version of the information in this book. Recommended with 4 stars.
March 18, 2026
Despite the provocative (if not partially misleading) title, this is a book filled with common sense ways to improve the parts of our food system that aren't working. If nothing else, will definitely serve as a check on my nostalgia towards an imagined agrarian past
March 24, 2026
Made me think more about the positive potential of food processing.... but, still.
December 13, 2025
Feed the People! was an insightful and engaging read about our modern food systems. There's some good stuff here and it tackles a variety of issues and questions without our current way of making and distributing food. Workers' rights, factory farms to "family farms", the over processing of food and who is allowed access to food, so on and so forth. I do NOT think people are going to like to read that they should limit and cut back on their meat, but as a Vegan Poser I was all for it. I don't think that people think about how our continual and increased meat consumption is extremely impacting our lands, our environment, and our water usage. I loved how this book tied back to the Waffle House and found it to be an insightful way to begin and end the book. NICE!
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews