Category: Books

Maria Rodale, CEO and Chairman of Rodale Inc., sheds new light on the state of 21st-century farming. She examines the unholy alliances that have formed between the chemical companies that produce fertilizer and genetically altered seeds, the agricultural educational system that is virtually subsidized by those same companies, and the government agencies in thrall to powerful lobbyists, all of which perpetuate dangerous farming practices and deliberate misconceptions about organic farming and foods.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial, 2008) Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, this book tells the story of how one family was changed by …

In modern agricultural politics, organic farming and genetic engineering occupy opposite ends of the spectrum. In the Ronald-Adamchak household, the world is not so black and white. Ronald is a professor of plant pathology at the University of California, Davis. Adamchak manages the student-run organic farm on campus. Together, they’re exploring the juncture where their methods can (and they argue, should) meet to ensure environmentally sustainable food production.

Fighting for the Future of Food tells the story of how a small group of social activists, working together across tables, continents, and the Internet, took on the biotech industry and achieved stunning success. Rachel Schurman and William A. Munro detail how the anti-biotech movement managed to alter public perceptions about GMOs and close markets to such products.

Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home. Whatever happens in the world, he demonstrates, ends up in our house, in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture.

Dinner at the New Gene Café expertly lays out the battle lines of the impending collision between a powerful but unproved technology and a gathering resistance from people worried about the safety of genetic change.

If you want to explore the story behind the controversy over “Frankenstein Foods” – genetically engineered crops like corn and soybeans – this is the book for you. It’s a story, rather than an argument on behalf of one side or the other. That story begins in the scientific breakthroughs of the early 1980s and the decision by one midwestern chemical company, Monsanto, to dive headfirst into biotechnology.