Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food [Hardcover]

Frederick Kaufman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 16, 2012 | ISBN-10: 0470631929 | ISBN-13: 978-0470631928 | Edition: 1

A prominent food journalist follows the trail from Big Pizza to square tomatoes to exploding food prices to Wall Street, trying figure out why we can't all have healthy, delicious, affordable food

In 2008, farmers grew enough to feed twice the world's population, yet more people starved than ever before—and most of them were farmers. In Bet the Farm, food writer Kaufman sets out to discover the connection between the global food system and why the food on our tables is getting less healthy and less delicious even as the the world's biggest food companies and food scientists say things are better than ever. To unravel this riddle, he moves down the supply chain like a detective solving a mystery, revealing a force at work that is larger than Monsanto, McDonalds or any of the other commonly cited culprits—and far more shocking.

Kaufman's recent cover story for Harper's, "The Food Bubble," provoked controversy throughout the food world, and led to appearances on the NBC Nightly News, MSNBC, Fox Business News, Democracy Now, and Bloomberg TV, along with features on National Public Radio and the BBC World Service.

• Visits the front lines of the food supply system and food politics as Kaufman visits farms, food science research labs, agribusiness giants, the United Nations, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and more
• Explains how food has been financialized and the powerful consequences of this change, including: the Arab Spring, started over rising food prices; farmers being put out of business; food scientists rushing to make easy-to-transport, homogenized ingredients instead of delicious foods
• Explains how the push for sustainability in food production is more likely to make everything worse, rather than better—and how the rise of fast food is bad for us, but catastrophic for those who will never even see a McNugget or frozen pizza

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Much has been made of the organic, local, and slow-food movements, but when it comes to feeding seven-billion people, these laudable efforts represent a small fraction of the food supply. Food has become in effect a type of currency, and the universal currency of food is pizza. Kaufman deconstructs a Domino’s pizza, tracing it back to the soil to find out how the massive quantities of wheat, tomatoes, meat (pepperoni), and milk (cheese) in it are produced. Surprisingly, he discovers a different movement of sorts, a sustainability movement being undertaken by the likes of industry giants Unilever, Tyson Foods, and the nation’s largest grocer, Walmart, a company that has taken a proactive stance on the ecological impact of its products. At the Ohio State University’s experimental research station, Kaufman considers the pros and cons of genetically modified food in a world in which new organisms are treated as intellectual property. These examinations lead us on a quest to discover why, in a world of food surpluses, a billion people still go hungry every day as food becomes increasingly globalized, industrialized, and commoditized. --David Siegfried

From the Inside Flap

In the last half decade, the world has seen two devastating spikes in the price of food, and a third may be on the way. In 2008 and 2010, farmers gathered record wheat harvests, yet more people starved than ever before—and most of them were farmers. How is that possible?

In Bet the Farm, Harper's magazine contributing editor Frederick Kaufman investigates the hidden connection between global food and global finance by asking the simple question: Why can't delicious, inexpensive, and healthy food be available to everyone on Earth?

You will find his discoveries shocking.

Like a detective intent on solving a mystery, Kaufman travels from the corporate headquarters of Domino's Pizza and Tyson Foods to Walmart's sustainability research center, to mega-farms and organic farms and numerous genetic modification laboratories. Kaufman goes to Rome to the meeting of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and finally ends up on Wall Street and the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where he discovers the answer to the riddle. His investigation reveals that money pouring into the global derivatives market in grain futures is having astonishing consequences that reach far beyond your dinner table, including the Arab Spring, bankrupt farmers, starving masses, and armies of scientists creating new GMO foods with U.S. marketing and shipping needs in mind instead of global nutrition.

Our food is getting less healthy, less delicious, and more expensive even as the world's biggest food companies and food scientists say things are better than ever and that the rest of us should leave it to them to feed the world. Readers of Bet the Farm will glimpse the power behind global food and understand what truly supports the system that has brought mass misery to our planet.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (October 16, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470631929
• ISBN-13: 978-0470631928
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.9 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #65,955 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #36 in Books > Business & Investing > Industries & Professions > Agriculture

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An Important Overview of the Global Food System November 3, 2012

By Theoros

Format:Hardcover

This book is an eye-opening account of how our food system works, or fails to work, often to the disadvantage of billions. The story is packed to the brim with information, but is never dull. Kaufman is a lively writer, able to bring humor to his discussion while reminding us that food system is--literally--a deadly serious business. There is a lot of fine critical writing about food these days, but Kaufman's book is different from almost all of it: instead of examining food's industrialization, he explains its financialization. Most of us know little or nothing about that, but by the time you're done with this book you'll realize that it's something everybody needs to understand. A couple of the previous reviews complain that the book is "political." That's utterly false if they mean it's duplicitous or engaged in cheap, partisan point-scoring. But I would say it is political in the oldest and best sense of the word: it asks us to think and care about important, common things, and about how we share the world with other people. That it also provides flashes of wit along with the information and insight is an added benefit

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book about how food comes to your table and why that is in danger November 1, 2012

By ProdigyHavoc11

Format:Hardcover

Occasionally, some one sounds the alarm about a coming crisis. Many times people ignore the warning or assume things are just fine the way they are (think of the housing market circa 2006). This is one of those books where the call needs to be listened to - before it is too late.

I've followed Mr. Kaufman's work for many years now - and no one knows the ins and outs of the food industry better. If you are one of those people who think that oil is speculated on out of control, wait until you read this and find out what speculators are doing to food!! They are literally "betting the farm" with my - as well as your - daily bread (and also our water!).

The book is easy as well as actually fun to read, and complex subjects are broken down into bite-size pieces, pardon the pun. You will see how the increase in food prices (driven by a wacky financialization of food stuffs) is already causing a farrago of problems throughout the world. And why it's only going to get worse unless we do something.

In sum, anyone wishing not to see future food riots and masses of people going hungry and starving - or who simply do not wish to pay exorbitant amounts for their own food - should read Bet the Farm. In the future, people will either point to it as a book which got people to take action, or a book whose messages was tragically not heeded.

12 of 18 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Wager on Wheat November 18, 2012

By Christian Schlect VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

A New York City author, Frederick Kaufman, here exhibits the strengths and weaknesses of a magazine journalist. He is good and colorful at reporting on what he sees and hears first hand, he is less good at explaining--let alone resolving--the inherent complexities of the world-wide food trade and hunger.

Descriptions of the pizza industry, GMOs, international donor conferences, and the Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops are worthwhile and enjoyable. I especially agreed with the distrust pronounced on number-driven certified programs for sustainability, such as the one now being pushed by Wal-Mart.

Things got murky for me when Mr. Kaufman visits some rich ex-Wall Street criminal who now farms 1,200 acres in upstate New York. This is the new "peasant"? Total darkness hit me when the author claims to have solved the big economic issue of pricing (and thus hunger) by laying all blame on the money greed factory that is Wall Street and Chicago. It seems all will be well once we reform and restrict complicated wheat index futures and other financial derivatives based on food. This takes care of political corruption and red tape, exploding population growth, transportation bottlenecks, pest infestations, plant-killing diseases, drought, and so forth?

In an inane, journalistic style ending, we are told that "The benefit of wheat is not cash. The benefit is bread, and the benefit of bread is life." You pay the bookstore about $25 (about a bushel or two of wheat) for 256 pages of text to benefit from these concluding thoughts.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning December 10, 2012

By Christopher Totten

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Very engaging read. I had read the shorter piece in Harper's and enjoyed reading the longer story of the author's journey to understand why the world has found the solution to world hunger to be so challenging. The conclusion may surprise many readers.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Ignore at your own peril - November 22, 2012

By Dust

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Disturbing, eye-opening, and absolutely of the highest significant social import. Kaufman attaches a remarkably clear high definition wide-angle lens to the camera he points towards food at scale, which is what food is becoming more and more as he clearly demonstrates through this investigative narrative. Perhaps the best book of the decade, and it reads like a series of highly engaging investigative essays. It will likely go down as a must read for anyone who consideres themselves in-tune with the contemporary human condition. If that isn't enough, it will utterly challenge your understanding of what food is, GMO, hunger, scarcity, famine, and how the very essence of foods' value has been hijacked via an insidious financial-roach-motel of never ending rolling buy orders for a highly derived and abstracted mixed-commodities index that seems to be wrenching the value-function of food from its very object, and of which there is by design no mechanism for exit.