America's Food: What You Don't Know About What You Eat | 
 enlarge | Author: Harvey Blatt
Publisher: The MIT Press
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
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Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 189845
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 384
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.9 x 1.4
ISBN: 026202652X
Dewey Decimal Number: 363.1920973
EAN: 9780262026529
ASIN: 026202652X
Publication Date: October 31, 2008
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Product Description
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 many different cattle raised in several different countries. In fact, most of us have a fairly abstract understanding of what happens on a farm. In iAmerica's Food,/i 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.br / br / 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. iAmerica's Food/i describes the production of all types of food in the United States and the environmental and health problems associated with each.br / br / 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.
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| Customer Reviews:
Packed full of information, lacking a good story January 7, 2009
Kristine Hale (Utah)
There are many books out there that attempt to tackle the story of America's Food System (Nestle, Pollan, Schlosser) but what sets this one apart is the sheer scope. America's Food: What You Don't Know About What You Eat covers an enormous amount of information. br / br /While other books focus on telling a story or taking you on a journey through the food system, this book is laid out like a long school report. Page after page of statistics, quotes and graphs swim in front of your eyes and, I admit, it takes some focus to put the numbers into a meaningful story. America's Food is lumped together by topic and reads like a student listing the facts about their chosen subject, so while you might find a more interesting story reading about the Corn Nation in The Omnivores Dilemma, you won't find nearly as much information about the world of corn as you will in this book, and for that reason alone, I give it 3 stars. If this book covered less territory, I would not recommend it at all. br / br /Blatt does a superb job of giving you all of the facts that you could possibly use with very little opinion or conjecture, but without much story or life either. br / br /
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