In critical food systems scholarship, Mark Bittman has found fertile ground for reform. Rooted in the history of fields and pursuit of nation building, Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal provides a counterweight to the framing of food systems as a collection of stagnant, guaranteed, or technocratic tools and policies. The author argues instead that our current food environment is the result of calculated, concentrated power—from colonial control to corporations—directing what we grow and how we eat, in a system that demands “of agriculture not food for people, but goods for market” (54).
By focusing on the historical examples of food processing (section 8), nutritional guidance (section 10), and pesticide use (section 13), Bittman highlights the promotion of dissected facts devoid of their contextual housing. The author discusses how science has been manipulated over time to distance consumers from food and privilege larger agri-food enterprises...
University of California Press