America's Food: What You Don't Know About What You Eat

by Harvey Blatt

The complete story of what we don't know, and what we should know, about American food production and its effect on health and the environment. We don't think much about how food gets to our tables, or what had to happen to fill our supermarket's produce section with perfectly round red tomatoes and its meat counter with slabs of beautifully marbled steak. We don't realize that the meat in one fast-food hamburger may come from a thousand different cattle raised in five different countries. In fact, most of us have a fairly abstract understanding of what happens on a farm. In America's Food , Harvey Blatt gives us the specifics. He tells us, for example, that a third of the fruits and vegetables grown are discarded for purely aesthetic reasons; that the artificial fertilizers used to enrich our depleted soil contain poisonous heavy metals; that chickens who stand all day on wire in cages choose feed with pain-killing drugs over feed without them; and that the average American eats his or her body weight in food additives each year. Blatt also asks us to think about the consequences of eating food so far removed from agriculture; why unhealthy food is cheap; why there is an International Federation of Competitive Eating; what we don't want to know about how animals raised for meat live, die, and are butchered; whether people are even designed to be carnivorous; and why there is hunger when food production has increased so dramatically. America's Food describes the production of all types of food in the United States and the environmental and health problems associated with each. After taking us on a tour of the American food system -- not only the basic food groups but soil, grain farming, organic food, genetically modified food, food processing, and diet -- Blatt reminds us that we aren't powerless. Once we know the facts about food in America, we can change things by the choices we make as consumers, as voters, and as ethical human beings

Genres: Food, Nonfiction

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you weren’t an environmentalist before reading this book you will be by the end. And maybe a vegetarian too.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly recommended for all Americans who eat food. Harvey Blatt traces the production of our meals from the field to the killing floor to the supermarket shelf, describing in measured but forceful prose the staggering concealed costs and outrageous human and animal suffering involved. This is a story of squandered wealth and mass cruelty -- a story of the dark side of contemporary American prosperity.

As I hoped, Blatt is not easily pigeonholed as a political partisan. His proposals for reform include ending agriculture subsidies as well as increasing the federal regulatory budget; he quotes Scripture, Milton Friedman, and Edmund Burke as freely as Rachel Carson and Amartya Sen. He also turns a skeptical eye on certain forms of environmental alarmism, making short work, for example, of Malthusian claims that the global food supply is threatened by overpopulation. (In fact, the world produces enough grain alone to make every man, woman, and child on earth overweight. But 40 percent of that grain goes to feed livestock. 25,000 people die from starvation every day, but not because of a lack of aggregate natural resources.) Occasionally Blatt lets his opinions obtrude upon facts that are damning enough without his commentary, but this is disappointing mainly because it is unnecessary. I challenge anyone, of any political or religious perspective, to read this book without making some sort of change in his or her eating habits.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading this book, I am considering never eating anything again. It is an eye-opening primer on industrial farming. The author takes different sorts of foodstuffs--one by one--and explains how they get to our plates, from start to finish. It is not a pretty story, unfortunately. Agribusiness is destroying the fragile ecosystems that support our agriculture just to make a buck. They are creating pests and weeds that are super-resistant to any control method, they are poisoning our meats and poultry with pharmeceuticals we don't want, and they are reducing our once-diverse agricultural bioculture to just a handful of species. And we have no choice but to eat it, because, after all, a girl or guy's gotta eat, right? Even organics are threatened by this agribusiness monster we've created. All for the sake of making a buck. Scary and sad.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a little more in depth than I was anticipating but I learned a lot about the food I eat. For example,according to this book I learned that a fast food hamburger patty contains meat from more than 1,000 different cattle raised in as many as 5 different countries... and that American women who consume a high amount of milk products suffer the world's highest incidents of osteoporosis..... I also learned about regulations on advertising "organic" on things as well as ton of interesting and disturbing information on pesticide use on our food supply and it's links to cancer and other disease. I have a lot to think on and see some changes on the horizon regarding the food I feed my family.

[Matthew Kunnari · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extremely thorough look at the food industry. Full of lots of facts about animal productivity and current industry practices. This book can become overwhelming if read all at once. One would probably want to give up eating. However, it is a good reference source.