Consumed: Food for a Finite Planet by Canadian author Sarah Elton, an assistant professor at Ryerson University and former food columnist for CBC Radio’s Here & Now show, is her agricultural/ecological issues travelogue, free for a limited time courtesy of publisher the University of Chicago Press.
This is their featured Free Book of the Month selection for November and won the American Library Association’s Choice Magazine’s CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Award.
The book sees her taking a worldwide tour across three continents, in countries ranging from China to Kenya to France and her native Canada, to look at local agricultural issues with global ecological effects, and also speak with farmers and scientist and others seeking to put together more beneficial alternatives to the established corporate industries.
Offered worldwide through the month of November, available directly from the publisher’s website.
Currently available @ the university’s dedicated promo page (Adobe Digital Editions-DRM ePub, requires newsletter signup with valid email address), and you can read more about the book on its regular catalogue page.
Description
By 2050, the world population is expected to reach nine billion. And the challenge of feeding this rapidly growing population is being made greater by climate change, which will increasingly wreak havoc on the way we produce our food. At the same time, we have lost touch with the soil—few of us know where our food comes from, let alone how to grow it—and we are at the mercy of multinational corporations who control the crops and give little thought to the damage their methods are inflicting on the planet. Our very future is at risk.
In Consumed, Sarah Elton walks fields and farms on three continents, not only investigating the very real threats to our food, but also telling the little-known stories of the people who are working against time to create a new and hopeful future. From the mountains of southern France to the highlands of China, from the crowded streets of Nairobi to the banks of the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, we meet people from all walks of life who are putting together an alternative to the omnipresent industrial food system. In the arid fields of rural India we meet a farmer who has transformed her community by selling organic food directly to her neighbors. We visit a laboratory in Toronto where scientists are breeding a new kind of rice seed that they claim will feed the world. We learn about Italy’s underground food movement; how university grads are returning to the fields in China, Greece, and France; and how in Detroit, plots of vacant land planted with kale and carrots can help us see what’s possible.
Food might be the problem, but as Elton shows, it is also the solution. The food system as we know it was assembled in a few decades—and if it can be built that quickly, it can be reassembled and improved in the same amount of time. Elton here lays out the targets we need to meet by the year 2050. The stories she tells give us hope for avoiding a daunting fate and instead help us to believe in a not-too-distant future when we can all sit at the table.
With Blackjack and Hookers 