The “bigger and cheaper” mentality of industrial agriculture incurs great environmental and social costs. But the growing number of women working to promote regenerative agriculture—loosely defined as growing practices that benefit soil health, water supply, and the larger climate ecosystem—offers hope for the future, author Stephanie Anderson argues in From the Ground Up. Women tend to prioritize collaboration, mentorship, and sustainability, Anderson notes, and those qualities are sorely needed as the agricultural sector faces challenges such as declining soil quality and the effects of climate change. 

From the Ground Up spotlights a wide range of women who are prioritizing a sustainability mindset when it comes to feeding their community and the wider world. Anderson weaves together engaging interviews with a range of women farmers, business leaders, and scientists with on-the-ground reporting and reflection on her own family’s involvement in industrial agriculture. Furthermore, she examines the roots of regenerative agriculture and the many contributions made by members of marginalized groups. In the end, From the Ground Up paints a hopeful picture of how agricultural practices could evolve for the better. —Katherine Kornei

Industrial Farm Animal Production, the Environment, and Public Health
Edited by James Merchant and Robert Martin

While this tome is as academic as its title suggests, it is an extremely thorough and well-documented work on the industrialization of meat and egg production. A collection of essays by academic, government, and NGO experts, it provides a timely look at the impact of our industrial food system on generational poverty, diminished civic life, reduced self-determination, and a growing lack of trust in government in rural communities. In excruciating detail, the book surveys the horrifying consequences of industrial farm animal operations: human and animal disease and mortality, antibiotic resistance, the suffering of animals and meat-packing workers, the near-serfdom of farmers to multinational corporations, vile air and water pollution, and the unredressed destruction of neighbors’ quality of life. It also reveals how we got here and why governments (federal and state) won’t do anything about this broken system. Finally, as a ray of hope, it offers some proven solutions for alleviating the worst of the system’s problems and—as a moonshot—steps to dismantle the system itself. —Anne N. Connor 

Conflict of Interest Statement: Connor was recently hired as a part-time science writer at Johns Hopkins University, whose press published this title, but has had no involvement with the book’s editors or authors.

In Search of the Perfect Peach: Why Flavour Holds the Answer to Fixing our Food System
By Franco Fubini 

Produce distributor Franco Fubini’s new book, In Search of the Perfect Peach, makes the case for a “flavor-first food system.” As founder and CEO of Natoora, a specialty produce company with outposts in Europe, Australia, and North America, Fubini with this book joins a larger conversation exploring fixes for a deeply broken system. He points to research on the “dilution effect” caused by growing for yield and shelf-stability in industrial agriculture. This causes nutrient-depleted soils and a loss of both flavor ans nutritional value, he claims, making a case that better-tasting produce is also more nutritious.

The titular, world-changing peach appears in the form of the Greta, an intensely flavorful, aromatic white peach from Campania, Italy, that inspired in him a deeper appreciation for rich flavor and hyper-seasonality. From there, Fubini takes readers on a tour—from tomato growers in Italy to flower farmers in Cornwall to citrus groves in California—while arguing that it’s possible to build a supply chain tailored around fresh, flavorful, high-quality produce. While the book would have benefitted from interrogating the role of class in how people approach conversations about fresh food, Fubini makes a compelling case for strengthening the connections between consumers and farmers. —s.e. smith

Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold Story of the Disappearing American Farmer
By Brian Reisinger 

As the world population grows toward 10 billion over the next quarter century, straining the global food system, growers face rising challenges, from labor shortages to climate change to a steady decline in farmable soil. While these problems increasingly make news headlines, the stories less often told are those of the farmers themselves. Writer and rural policy expert Brian Reisinger’s memoir is thus a rare find. The raw and unfiltered narrative spans four generations of his farming family, set against the backdrop of agricultural history that runs from the Great Depression through COVID. Highlighting the barriers that small farms face amid a growing world population and demand for food, Reisinger poses the question, “Will we make it?” And rightly so: Since 1982, the number of farms has declined by 7 percent between 2017 and 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). 

The Reisinger family’s journey into farming began in 1912, soon after his great-grandfather and grandmother emigrated from Bavaria, Germany, to Wisconsin. The young couple started a 180-acre dairy farm for livelihood to raise their 14 children. Each new generation inherited the farm and faced many hardships, from icy winters to the Farm Crisis of the 1980s and rapid changes in technology. Gripping stories point to how dangerous the profession can be—the author’s grandfather Albert fell 30 feet in a corn silo, breaking his back, and his parents Jim and Jean braved ice storms, illness, and the forced sale of their cows, followed by the struggle to return to dairy farming. Does the author ultimately take on the family farm? The read is well worth finding out. Moreover, we gain a much greater appreciation of American farmers and all they brave to produce the food we eat. —Amy Wu

Leftovers: A History of Food Waste and Preservation
By Eleanor Barnett

Spoiler alert: Food waste squanders resources, contributes to climate change, and plagues wealthy nations—especially (and counterintuitively) since the advent of refrigeration. Though it’s a familiar topic for many by now, Eleanor Barnett’s detailed storytelling makes food waste fascinating in Leftovers: A History of Food Waste and Preservation. From medieval England to Brexit and the pandemic, Barnett expertly rolls out the dough of U.K. history to prove that “if ‘you are what you eat,’ our values and culture are equally defined by what we don’t eat.” 

The book traces changing attitudes towards food waste through several centuries, and though the focus is on Great Britain, Barnett shows how the British culture of excess spread with the empire and persists in many ways to this day. Wasting food in 1500s England was, of course, a luxury. But the widespread practice of redistributing leftovers helped those in need and limited waste. Colonialism brought new, mind-boggling bounty, and with the Victorian onset of the “throwaway society,” leftovers were out and convenience was in. During the world wars, the U.K. government rallied citizens to again save those leftovers: Land Girls saved crops from rotting on farms; Pig Clubs fed kitchen scraps to swine to produce extra meat rations. But after World War II, Europeans wanted a “seat at the feast the Americans were hosting.” The Brits abolished public funding for food preservation in 1954. Then came refrigeration, plastics, the Green Revolution, and agricultural advances that changed how the world gets—and throws out—its food.

“‘The world produces enough food to feed everyone, if distributed equally,’” Barnett writes, quoting the founders of Food Not Bombs. Pandemic-era distribution efforts showed us what’s possible in terms of food rescue, and AI is already in the kitchen tracking scraps. Pick up Leftovers for motivation on reducing the muckpile. —Leorah Gavidor

Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company
By Alice Driver

Investigative journalist Alice Driver cements her reputation as one of the foremost chroniclers of the perilous lives of food chain workers in her debut book Life and Death of the American Worker, a story of the unrealized promise of the American dream. This sweeping investigation closely follows a handful of immigrant and refugee workers subjected to merciless, regulations-skirting conditions while processing more than a hundred birds per minute at Tyson’s meatpacking plants in rural Arkansas, where Driver grew up.

Expanding on Driver’s award-winning Civil Eats investigation, the book reveals how Tyson’s meatpacking industry is structured to conceal injuries. Workers are directed to on-site nurses and company-approved doctors, all part of a vertically integrated healthcare system that downplays and ignores injuries—and even punishes workers for seeking medical help. There is an eviscerating quality to Driver’s prose as she renders in exacting detail the workers’ repetitive motions and neglected injuries. 

But this is not just the story of a corporation’s harrowing disregard for life; it is also about what Driver describes as the “moral beauty of the immigrants who process our nation’s meat,” like the women workers who joined together to teach each other how to stand up for their rights. Driver takes us inside the homes of workers, witnessing their daily rituals of survival and grief. In one especially haunting scene, a former Tyson worker leaves a “cup covered in red hearts full of fresh coffee for Plácido”—an offering to her husband who died of Covid-19 early in the pandemic. He was likely predisposed to the virus because his lungs had been engulfed in ammonia after a chloride spill at Tyson. Life and Death of the American Worker is essential reading for anyone who cares about the U.S. food system and the immigrant workers who sacrifice their health to make it possible. —Grey Moran

Love, Nature, Magic: Shamanic Journeys into the Heart of My Garden
By Maria Rodale

Grass, mosquitos, vultures, and paper wasps are some of the 26 more-than-human kin with whom Maria Rodale converses in her Pennsylvania garden in Love, Nature, Magic. Head of the Rodale Institute and Rodale, Inc. publishing group, which specializes in works about nature, Rodale provides a 101-level glimpse of the shamanic journeying process, which traditionally involves interacting with the spirit world and other realms of consciousness to unlock power or information for healing or reunification. Unlike some practitioners, her version of journeying does not involve ingesting anything; rather, Rodale facilitates these experiences using sound—specifically a drum or rattle—as her shamanic guide. (Still other practitioners may use ecstatic dance as a method of transport.)

This tome, a peek into animism and pantheism, relates a series of essay-like journal entries from April 2021 to May 2022 that detail Rodale’s visits with the insects, plants, fauna, and fungi in her garden. Her journals expound upon the dialogues she carries out with her more-than-human kin, and the lessons she absorbs from  observing the ways they conduct their lives. Love, Nature, Magic is suited to readers who yearn for nature amid urban life, seeking to connect with the wildness that is already within them. Ultimately, this book answers the question: How can we co-exist more peaceably with nature by understanding the ways of nature? —Sarahlynn Pablo

The Memory of Taste: Vietnamese American Recipes from Phú Quoc, Oakland, and the Spaces Between 
By Tu David Phu and Soleil Ho

Tu David Phu’s new cookbook is an homage to immigrant families—and mothers, in particular. The Top Chef alum, raised in Oakland, California, focuses on stories and recipes from Phú Quoc, an island in the Southwest of Vietnam where his parents are from.

The son of refugees, Phu grew up with his father, a fishmonger, and his mother, a seamstress. Several essays throughout the cookbook serve as a guide to his upbringing and ethos. For example, an essay on seafood sustainability covers not only where fish are caught, but also how using all parts of a fish is the way his family sustained themselves, like the many generations before them. The book was written with Soleil Ho, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist and the paper’s former food critic, and edited by Bryant Terry (Black Food, Vegan Soul Kitchen).  

In these pages, you will find recipes for Vietnamese hotpot soup made with salmon, a brined herring salad, and classics like pho ga, a chicken noodle soup. Tu shares Vietnamese staples, including a pickle of julienned daikon and carrots that pairs well with many dishes, and a simple lime and fresh-cracked pepper dipping sauce for seafood such as steamed crab that opens up the palate. Filled with colorful photos, the book will be a welcome addition for food lovers who want to expand their repertoire of Vietnamese dishes, from traditional recipes to “authentically inauthentic” chef creations. —Momo Chang

The Mighty Red
By Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, The Mighty Red, takes place in a fictional town in North Dakota’s Red River Valley, a region famous for growing sugar beets. Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, previously wrote about the rise of that crop as a commodity  and the bittersweet ways it changed life in the valley, in her 1986 novel The Beet Queen.

The Mighty Red takes place between 2008 and 2024, with a different cast of characters and in a new era of commodity agriculture. Where beet-growing once brought population growth and chain stores, now trucking, chemicals, and climate change surround the industry. The novel centers on a mixed-race character named Kismet, following both her love triangle with Gary, the son of an established farming family, and Hugo, a dropout autodidact, and the financial and relationship troubles of her beet-truck driver mother and theater-teacher father. Yet the valley and its ecosystem, especially its birds, drive the motion of the novel as much as its characters. Erdrich’s well-hewn skill for writing multigenerational dramas about the Native, European-descended, and mixed-race people of the upper Midwest, mixed with detailed and poignant ecological themes, makes for a layered, urgent, human story. —Caroline Tracey

My Regenerative Kitchen: Plant-Based Recipes and Sustainable Practices to Nourish Ourselves and the Planet
By Camilla Marcus

At a time when achieving systemic change in the food system can feel next to impossible, Camilla Marcus invites readers to focus on the good they can do within their own homes. In My Regenerative Kitchen, the chef and restaurateur draws on her experience as the founder of west~bourne, New York City’s first certified zero-waste eatery, to present a bevy of dishes that support sustainable farming through delicious cooking. Now living in California, Marcus curates an eclectic menu that integrates her home state’s produce (think avocado oil and Espelette chili peppers) with world influences, particularly Japanese, Middle Eastern, and Italian cuisines. 

For her, “regenerative” reflects agriculture that improves soil health, protects water and biodiversity, and minimizes both waste and chemical inputs. In keeping with that philosophy, her recipes are all plant-based, often feature cover crops like sorghum and buckwheat, and are designed to maximize the use of every ingredient. I especially appreciated the zero-waste “pro tips” sprinkled throughout the text, such as saving the boiled kombu seaweed from Japanese dashi broth to transform into furikake seasoning. Marcus’ earnest writing style, combined with Ben Rosser’s airy film photography, lend the book a certain West Coast utopian vibe, and it’s clear she believes in the potential of individuals to shift food culture. “Together we can regenerate for the next generation,” she urges. “So, in our home kitchens, let’s be radicals, naturally.” —Daniel Walton

Nuggets of Gold: Further Processed Chicken and the Making of the American Diet
By Patrick Dixon

Few foods are more quintessentially American than the chicken nugget. In his debut book, Nuggets of Gold, historian Patrick Dixon offers a primer on the history of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), the poultry industry, and the chicken nugget.

In 1923, a Delaware farmer accidentally received 10 times as many chickens as she ordered. Instead of returning the chickens, the farmer decided to expand her operation, figuring she might be able to return a decent profit. And she could. By 1926, she had 10,000 birds. Swiftly, an era of CAFOs began in poultry production, which still reigns today. In the post-World War II era, concerns about global food shortages and population booms made “ending hunger” a key focus of U.S. agricultural and foreign policy. The chicken nugget was born during this time—a solution to using parts of a chicken typically wasted in processing and an ideal consumerist option in a growing convenience-oriented economy. Made of “further processed chicken,” nugget production involves the “reclamation of meat that took place once the most popular cuts—breasts, wings, and legs—had been removed from the carcass,” Dixon explains. Increased nugget demand, driven by McDonald’s and other fast-food chains, meant increased demand for cheap chickens. Through the rise of chicken production and consumption, Dixon masterfully illustrates 20th and 21st century U.S. food history—and the evolution of extractive capitalism.

In Nuggets of Gold, which provides a multi-layered narrative through the analysis of historical documents, Dixon argues that the workers on farms, within processing plants, and on the meatpacking floor should be at the core of the poultry industry story. In the epilogue, he writes: “As a thousand poultry lines spun on into the future, nearly two hundred birds per minute hurtling along on a fast track from a cage to a cardboard box in a truck, the human damage that was the untold price of these journeys remained unaccounted for.” —Nina Elkadi

Our South: Black Food Through My Lens
By Ashleigh Shanti

The past few years have seen a handful of cookbook authors try to change perceptions of Black cuisine, rejecting old stereotypes that reduce the flavors of an entire diaspora to a few Southern dishes. Top Chef alum Ashleigh Shanti is the latest to add her voice to this conversation with her debut cookbook, Our South: Black Food Through My Lens.

A Black, queer, Southern chef raised in Virginia and now based in Asheville, North Carolina, Shanti takes readers on a journey through five southern microregions—Backcountry, Lowcountry, Midlands, Lowlands, and Homeland—showcasing their distinct food traditions. Each section honors a woman in her family whose unique cooking style shaped Shanti’s palate and culinary career. Classic recipes like stewed tomatoes, cornbread, Leather Britches (dried green beans), and potlikker meet more personal takes like Spicy Beet Chow Chow, Vinegar-Cured Trout and Sour Apples, and savory Cabbage and Mushroom Pancakes. 

With 125 recipes and stunning photography by Johnny Autry, Our South is both a traditional cookbook and coffee table book, making it a perfect centerpiece for any kitchen or living space. Whether you’re a seasoned cook or a culinary novice, Shanti’s book offers something for everyone, combining small bites and big meals with heartfelt anecdotes that all celebrate the rich cultural tapestry of the South. —Nicole J. Caruth

The Painful Truth about Hunger in America: Why We Must Unlearn Everything We Think We Know—and Start Again
By Mariana Chilton

Mariana Chilton’s new book is a necessary read for anyone who wants to understand the issue of hunger in the United States. Chilton, a professor of health management and policy at Pennsylvania’s Drexel University with a master’s degree in epidemiology, has founded numerous anti-hunger programs like the Center for Hunger-Free Communities and Witnesses to Hunger, and has advised Congress on how to end hunger in America. With The Painful Truth about Hunger in America, she helps us wrap our heads around how, even in 2024, getting a nutritious and affordable meal in the United States can be so damn hard.

The book is not for the faint of heart, both for its painful subject matter and its academic tone (complete with four appendices). But to really tackle the complicated issue of food insecurity in the U.S., we cannot overlook Chilton’s wealth of understanding. The text journeys from personal stories—her own, and those of numerous Black and brown women—to the political and the spiritual. Chilton leaves no stone unturned in surveying how systemic biases and institutional greed have exacerbated the solvable problem of hunger in America. She links abuse and gender-based violence to hunger, a connection rarely made in conversations regarding malnutrition.

Furthermore, Chilton wants readers to understand the systemic nature of those biased inequities, which riddle all facets of a person’s life. In this, she challenges those who point to welfare dependency and the abundance of food as evidence the issue of hunger is no longer pressing. Chilton’s new work on a stunningly persistent American problem is paramount. —Paolo Bicchieri

Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch
By Andrea Freeman

Ruin Their Crops on the Ground is a haunting read. Taking its title from George Washington’s 1779 command to destroy Indigenous harvests and “prevent their planting more,” this book details the use of food as a political weapon in America. Freeman, a law professor who coined the term “food oppression,” traces our country’s significant racial health disparities to U.S. food law and policy. Using research and centering the stories of individuals, she creates a narrative that shows the multiple roles food has played and continues to play in subjugating Indigenous, enslaved, and Latinx (Freeman prefers the term “Latine”) people.

Freeman offers thorough histories of the privations of Indian boarding schools and commodity diets, plantation feeding methods, and the home economics efforts used to “Americanize” immigrants. She writes about milk as a marker of whiteness and white superiority, compiling data that shows the narrow band of lactose tolerance that makes the popular and sometimes-force-fed drink harmful to many people. And she highlights a campaign started by Toronto high schoolers to boycott fast food, with images of a McDonald’s French fry box filled with bullets; the USDA, she writes, would not fund such food truth campaigns, because of the unbreakable bonds between industry and government. In the last chapter, she argues that health equity should be tackled in the courts in the same way as civil rights issues, in order to remedy the impacts of U.S. food policy. —Amy Halloran

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
By Robin Wall Kimmerer

The Serviceberry is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s small but mighty argument for gift economies. “I’ve never quite understood something about human economics, and that is the primacy of scarcity as an organizing principle,” she writes. Schooled by plants, the author of Braiding Sweetgrass understands abundance and gratitude as fundamental instead. She asks us to consider the currency of cooperative relationships as an alternative to the market economy, posing her reasoning under the generous berry-like fruits of the serviceberry, a small deciduous tree or shrub that blossoms white in spring. 

Native to the Americas, the plant is significant to Indigenous diets as one of the main ingredients in pemmican, a staple of dried berries and meat. Also known as shadbush and shadblow, for blooming during the time shad fish once spawned, the plant—important to many cultures—has other names, too, like sugarplum, sarvis, juneberry, and saskatoon berry. Using examples from ecological economics—not to be confused with environmental economics, which is transactional in nature—Kimmerer lovingly offers the serviceberry and its web of interdependent relationships, which include soil and birds, as a necessary way forward. Why not choose economic biomimicry and cooperation as a model for thriving? —Amy Halloran

Transfarmation: The Movement to Free Us from Factory Farming
By Leah Garcés 

In Transfarmation, Leah Garcés criss-crosses the United States helping farmers transition from industrial animal agriculture to raising hemp and crops people can eat. As president and CEO of the nonprofit Mercy for Animals, Garcés has long been a leader in the animal protection movement: her work led to a New York Times’ 2021 op-ed about the harms of the chicken industry. In 2019, Mercy for Animals founded Transfarmation, a program that helps farmers find alternatives to factory farming, which it views as harmful to animals, the environment, farmworkers, and rural communities.

This quick read, which serves as a primer for that project, is much like Manifesto for a Moral Revolution by Jacqueline Novogratz, as the writing of a leader who spends more time at work in the field than on email. In the book, Garcés helps chicken and pig operations transition to clean, climate-friendly crops including hemp and mushrooms and adopts a few chickens along the way, including one lucky hen aptly named Henrietta. In addition to her accounts of farm visits, Garcés provides hard-to-swallow stats, well-written personal reflections on family and the future, and actionable plans for what farmers—and eaters—can do to build better food systems. —Paolo Bicchieri     

Other Notable Titles

Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels
By Caroline Eden

The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
By Olivia Laing

Radical Food Geographies: Power, Knowledge, and Resistance
Edited by Colleen Hammelman, Charles Z. Levkoe, and Kristin Reynolds

Sarah Raven’s Garden Cookbook
By Sarah Raven

Spice: The 16th-Century Contest that Shaped the Modern World
By Roger Crowley

Our Recent Books Coverage

Our South: Black Food Through My Lens
By Ashleigh Shanti
The new cookbook from ‘Top Chef’ alum Ashleigh Shanti features recipes from five micro-regions of the American South.

Group Living and Other Recipes
By Lola Milholland
In this memoir of communal living, which celebrates families, relationships, and food, Milholland explores how sharing meals and living space deepens our ability to connect to one another.

Dodge County, Incorporated: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America
By Sonja Trom Eayrs
A family law attorney chronicles her family’s battle against factory hog farms in Minnesota and the corporate takeover of rural America.

The Three Ages of Water: Prehistoric Past, Imperiled Present, and a Hope for the Future
By Peter Gleick
A water expert discusses agriculture in the Western U.S., the driest part of the country, and how to move toward a sustainable future.

Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere
By Rob Jackson
A climate scientist dives deep into the climate and health impacts of gas stoves and other food-and-climate solutions.