Daniel Pauly: The Ocean’s Shifting Baseline

The ocean has degraded within our lifetimes, as shown in the decreasing average size of fish. And yet, as Daniel Pauly shows us onstage at Mission Blue, each time the baseline drops, we call it the new “normal.” At what point do we stop readjusting downward?

Pandora’s Lunchbox by Melanie Warner

If a piece of individually wrapped cheese can retain its shape, color, and texture for years, what does it say about the food we eat and feed to our children? Former “New York Times” business reporter and mother Melanie Warner decided to explore that question when she observed the phenomenon of the indestructible cheese. She began an investigative journey that took her to research labs, university food science departments, and factories around the country.

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Food Rights by David E. Gumpert

Who is it that decides what you get to eat? In reality, it’s not a decision you actually get to make for yourself. Concentration of production and processing in the hands of fewer and fewer large companies has resulted in more control over what is grown, processed, and packaged for sale.

Hit By a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn by Catherine Friend

Hit by a Farm is a hilarious recounting of Catherine and Melissa’s trials of “getting back to the land.” It is also a coming-of (middle)-age story of a woman trying to cross the divide between who she is and who she wants to be, and the story of a couple who say “goodbye city life” — and learn more than they ever bargained for about love, land, and yes, sheep sex.

From the Wood-Fired Oven by Richard Miscovich

Whether you have a wood-fired oven out back (or are planning to build one) or you bake in a conventional home oven, invest in your own copy and read it cover to cover. Even if you’ve got years of baking experience, you will find some great insights. And, after all, who can possibly have too many bread books?

The Web of Life, Dr. Fred Provenza

Biodiversity in plant communities can enhance the well-being of soil, plants, and animals, and ultimately, human beings. That’s good health in the broadest sense.

The Land Remembers by Ben Logan

In The Land Remembers, Ben Logan presents his childhood in a way that gives us all a feeling we were there, and at the same time we missed out.