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How the World Eats: Where Our Food Comes From and Why It Matters
464 pages, Paperback
Published October 9, 2025
3 people are currently reading
23 people want to read
About the author
Julian Baggini
77 books599 followersJulian Baggini is a British philosopher and the author of several books about philosophy written for a general audience. He is the author of The Pig that Wants to be Eaten and 99 other thought experiments (2005) and is co-founder and editor of The Philosophers' Magazine. He was awarded his Ph.D. in 1996 from University College London for a thesis on the philosophy of personal identity. In addition to his popular philosophy books, Baggini contributes to The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer, and the BBC. He has been a regular guest on BBC Radio 4's In Our Time.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 25, 2025
How the World Eats: A Global Food Philosophy is one of those rare food books that manages to be genuinely global, philosophically ambitious and still concrete enough that you keep wanting to read out loud “did you know…?” facts to whoever is nearby. It is not a cookbook or a simple polemic about “good” and “bad” foods; it is an attempt to rethink what a just, sustainable food system could look like by walking the reader through wildly different ways humans grow, trade and eat food around the world.
Baggini uses case studies from hunter‑gatherer communities to ultra‑processed food environments, from small farmers to multinational agribusiness, to show that there is no single “right” way to eat, only systems that are more or less fair, sustainable and humane. The structure lets you move between vivid, grounded examples (who actually gets paid in a coffee chain, how diets get colonised by processed foods, how seeds are controlled by a few corporations) and broader principles like circularity, compassion and equity. For readers who care about climate or social justice, the chapters on food‑system emissions and on the tiny share of value captured by farmers are particularly powerful.
This is a great fit if you are interested in food politics, sustainability, ethics or systems thinking and want something more reflective than a standard “eat less meat” manifesto but more readable than an academic monograph. It would also work well for book clubs, teaching or anyone who enjoys books that connect everyday habits (your morning coffee, your supermarket shop) to the larger world they depend on.
Why I gave 5 stars?
The writing is clear and unpretentious, closer to long‑form journalism than academic philosophy, but you can feel the philosophical training in how carefully arguments are built and counterarguments considered. Baggini is good at explaining complex supply‑chain or policy issues without jargon, and he resists easy villains: supermarkets, farmers, consumers and governments are all shown as entangled in the same messy system.
Baggini uses case studies from hunter‑gatherer communities to ultra‑processed food environments, from small farmers to multinational agribusiness, to show that there is no single “right” way to eat, only systems that are more or less fair, sustainable and humane. The structure lets you move between vivid, grounded examples (who actually gets paid in a coffee chain, how diets get colonised by processed foods, how seeds are controlled by a few corporations) and broader principles like circularity, compassion and equity. For readers who care about climate or social justice, the chapters on food‑system emissions and on the tiny share of value captured by farmers are particularly powerful.
This is a great fit if you are interested in food politics, sustainability, ethics or systems thinking and want something more reflective than a standard “eat less meat” manifesto but more readable than an academic monograph. It would also work well for book clubs, teaching or anyone who enjoys books that connect everyday habits (your morning coffee, your supermarket shop) to the larger world they depend on.
Why I gave 5 stars?
The writing is clear and unpretentious, closer to long‑form journalism than academic philosophy, but you can feel the philosophical training in how carefully arguments are built and counterarguments considered. Baggini is good at explaining complex supply‑chain or policy issues without jargon, and he resists easy villains: supermarkets, farmers, consumers and governments are all shown as entangled in the same messy system.
Displaying 1 of 1 review