Tag Archive for: agriculture

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We Are Eating The Earth: The race to fix our food system and save our climate | Michael Grunwald

 

Humanity has cleared a land mass the size of Asia plus Europe to grow food, and our food system generates about a third of our carbon emissions. We need to slow our relentless expansion of farmland into nature. In We Are Eating The Earth, Grunwald points out that we are making it worse by embracing solutions that sound sustainable but make it even harder to grow more food with less land. He also tells the stories of scientists and entrepreneurs pursuing better solutions; from a tough jungle crop called pongamia to genetically-edited cattle embryos, from Impossible Whoppers to a non-polluting pesticide that uses the technology behind the COVID vaccines to constipate beetles to death.

Grunwald builds his narrative around a food and land expert named Tim Searchinger, chronicling Searchinger’s uphill battles against bad science and bad politics, both driven by the overwhelming influence of agricultural interests. He proposes a different path that could save our planet for future generations—through better policy, technology, and behaviour, and with a new land ethic that recognises that every acre matters.

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Meat | Bruce Friedrich

 

A hopeful, research-driven exploration setting out how humanity can satisfy its appetite for meat without the environmental, health, and ethical damage caused by conventional animal agriculture. Friedrich, who founded the Good Food Institute, frames meat not as a problem to be abolished, but as a beloved food that can be replaced by plant-based and lab-grown meats which can match or surpass conventional meat in taste, safety, nutrition, and cost. Situating alternative proteins as part of “the next agricultural revolution,” he compares their adoption curve to transformative technologies like automobiles and smartphones. An optimistic, practical vision for a future where meat remains central to diets but is produced in ways that are kinder to the planet, animals, and people.

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Dirt | Laura Baggaley

 

In the near future, global food supply chains have failed: people live on rations, and supplement their food by growing as much as they can on government-allotted plots of land. For most people, farming is controlled by a huge agricultural company that dictates what crops they plant and how they manage them.

At the heart of the story are two teenagers, Sam and Avril: Sam lives in town, where he and his family follow the rules of the Green Cultivation Corporation, and Avril lives in a beautiful hidden valley where her extended family practices sustainable agriculture. The collision of their different ways of thinking about how to farm and how to live drives this touching romance about sustainable agriculture, community versus insularity, and sharing rather than hoarding.

 

The Meat Paradox |Rob Percival

 

In our past as hunter-gatherers, we were predators. But in an agricultural age, our relationship to the animals we kill for their meat has undergone a slow but radical transformation. In his unflinching study of how this shift plays out in the modern psyche, Rob Percival explores how our capacity to empathise with suffering animals clashes with our willingness to consume their flesh. In doing so he challenges us to confront the uncomfortable truths that lie on our dinner plates and to grapple with the moral implications of our appetites – making this an essential read for anyone struggling with their conscience.

Eating Animals | Jonathan Safran Foer

 

 

Safran Foer’s hard-hitting yet deeply personal examination of the meat industry in the USA explores the brutal landscape of modern food production. Driven to dig deeper into his own ethical and environmental dilemmas, Foer dismantles the facades of the meat industry, exposing the ugly realities that lurk behind the neatly packaged cuts.

Drawing from his own experiences and extensive research, Safran Foer presents a compelling case for reconsidering our relationship with food and the creatures we consume, challenging readers to confront the uncomfortable truths of factory farming, and questioning the moral implications of our dietary choices. At the same time he charts the environmental devastation wrought by mass livestock production, highlighting the staggering ecological footprint of meat consumption, and he champions the farmers and activists striving to create a more compassionate and sustainable food system. Through their stories, he invites readers to imagine a future where ethical considerations guide our food choices, making Eating Animals not just a condemnation of factory farming but a call to action.

Meat Lovers | Rebecca Hawkes

Tender and brutal, seductive and repulsive, Meat Lovers introduces a compelling new mode of hardcore pastoral.

I am trying to go vegetarian but finding myself weak,
week to week browsing the meat aisle at a linger
close enough to chill my arms to gooseflesh. I only buy
stuff so processed it hardly makes sense to call it meat.
Saveloy, nugget, continental frankfurter;
whatever gets extruded pink beyond possible memory
of the preceding body.
— ‘The Flexitarian’

In this dazzling first collection, acclaimed Wellington poet and Canterbury farm-girl Rebecca Hawkes takes a generous bite from the excesses of earthly flesh – first ‘Meat’, then ‘Lovers’.

‘Meat’ is a coming of age in which pony clubs, orphaned lambs and dairy-shed delirium are infused with playful menace and queer longings. Between bottle-fed care and killing-shed floors, the farm is a heady setting for love and death.

In ‘Lovers’, the poet casts a wry eye over romance, from youthful sapphic infatuation to seething beastliness. Sentimental intensity is anchored by an introspective comic streak, in which ‘the stars are watching us / and boy howdy are they judgemental’.

This collection of queasy hungers offers a feast of explosive mince & cheese pies, accusatory crackling, lab-grown meat and beetroot tempeh burger patties, all washed down with bloody milk or apple-mush moonshine. It teems with sensuous life, from domesticated beasts to the undulating mysteries of eels, as Hawkes explores uneasy relationships with our animals and with each other.

Source: Auckland University Press