Customer Reviews

America's Food: What You Don't Know About What You Eat

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Harvey Blatt is a professor of geology and had written the book America's Environmental Report Card: Are We Making the Grade? prior to America's Food. The two books share the same style in that they are loaded with liberal amounts of facts and figures. The endnotes run 52 pages long! The sources cover both scholarly publications and popular magazines and there is a list of suggested readings spanning 7 pages.

The book can be roughly divided into four parts. The first three chapters deal with soil and grain. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the diametrically opposed topics of organic food (including organically raised animals) and genetically modified (GM) food. The next section deals with the specific animals, namely poultry, livestock and fish. The last two chapters discuss food processing and measures of (poor) health resulting from imbalanced diet.

In my opinion the word "distortion" is the keyword of this book. Blatt suggested this when he discusses breastfeeding and the use of cow milk in human diet (p. 141), where "nature knows best how to keep us healthy". The idea is present in other, more subtle ways as well: the introduction of chemical fertilizers to reap short-term benefit at the expense of sustainability, raising ever-increasing amounts of grain to feed the farm animals in response to increasing human demand to meat, and the cruelty that is imposed upon farm animals, to name a few.

Speaking of the topic of cruelty imposed upon farm animals, while there are descriptions of poor living conditions of factory farms, there is little discussion on the philosophical aspects of it. There are also rhetorical questions that surround this topic. It is controversial, involves value judgment, and in my opinion deserves more extensive treatment. On the question of whether human is carnivorous or herbivorous, Blatt appeals to the latter by using comparison and persuades the reader through the apparent advantages of eating more vegetables, which in my opinion is not too different from "standard explanations" offered by other people. Of course, if Blatt intends to deal only with the purely factual aspect of American food, these considerations may not be within the scope of the book.

Overall, the book does a great job in introducing to uninitiated readers the state of the affairs of the American food (and to a smaller extent, world food), how it got into its present state, and sets the perspective for further readings. Environmentalists may also find the book sympathetic to their cause. Some readers may find the need to go through the figures akin to drinking from a fire hose, though!

There are many books out there that attempt to tackle the story of America's Food System (Nestle, Pollan, Schlosser) but what sets this one apart is the sheer scope. America's Food: What You Don't Know About What You Eat covers an enormous amount of information.

While other books focus on telling a story or taking you on a journey through the food system, this book is laid out like a long school report. Page after page of statistics, quotes and graphs swim in front of your eyes and, I admit, it takes some focus to put the numbers into a meaningful story. America's Food is lumped together by topic and reads like a student listing the facts about their chosen subject, so while you might find a more interesting story reading about the Corn Nation in The Omnivores Dilemma, you won't find nearly as much information about the world of corn as you will in this book, and for that reason alone, I give it 3 stars. If this book covered less territory, I would not recommend it at all.

Blatt does a superb job of giving you all of the facts that you could possibly use with very little opinion or conjecture, but without much story or life either.