Print List Price:	$17.99
Kindle Price:	$9.99 Save $8.00 (44%)
Sold by:	Random House LLC Price set by seller.

Add Audible narration to your purchase for just $8.99

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

The Fate of Food: What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World by [Amanda Little]

Follow the Author

Amanda Little

The Fate of Food: What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World Kindle Edition

by Amanda Little (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.5 365 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Kindle

"Please retry"

$9.99

—

Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

$7.95 with discounted Audible membership

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$11.20

$5.28

$1.30

Paperback

"Please retry"

$17.99

$12.19

$3.14

Kindle
$9.99 Read with Our Free App
Audiobook
$0.00 Free with your 3-Month Audible trial
Hardcover
$11.20

Other new, used and collectible from $1.30

86 Used from $1.30

49 New from $5.28

2 Collectible from $12.00
Paperback
$17.99

Other new and used from $3.14

14 Used from $3.14

13 New from $12.19

Great on Kindle

Great Experience. Great Value.

Enjoy a great reading experience when you buy the Kindle edition of this book. Learn more about Great on Kindle, available in select categories.

WINNER OF THE 2019 NAUTILUS BOOK AWARD

In the fascinating story of the sustainable food revolution, an environmental journalist and professor asks the question: Is the future of food looking bleak—or better than ever?

“In The Fate of Food, Amanda Little takes us on a tour of the future. The journey is scary, exciting, and, ultimately, encouraging.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction

Climate models show that global crop production will decline every decade for the rest of this century due to drought, heat, and flooding. Water supplies are in jeopardy. Meanwhile, the world’s population is expected to grow another 30 percent by midcentury. So how, really, will we feed nine billion people sustainably in the coming decades?

Amanda Little, a professor at Vanderbilt University and an award-winning journalist, spent three years traveling through a dozen countries and as many U.S. states in search of answers to this question. Her journey took her from an apple orchard in Wisconsin to a remote control organic farm in Shanghai, from Norwegian fish farms to famine-stricken regions of Ethiopia.

The race to reinvent the global food system is on, and the challenge is twofold: We must solve the existing problems of industrial agriculture while also preparing for the pressures ahead. Through her interviews and adventures with farmers, scientists, activists, and engineers, Little tells the fascinating story of human innovation and explores new and old approaches to food production while charting the growth of a movement that could redefine sustainable food on a grand scale. She meets small permaculture farmers and “Big Food” executives, botanists studying ancient superfoods and Kenyan farmers growing the country's first GMO corn. She travels to places that might seem irrelevant to the future of food yet surprisingly play a critical role—a California sewage plant, a U.S. Army research lab, even the inside of a monsoon cloud above Mumbai. Little asks tough questions: Can GMOs actually be good for the environment—and for us? Are we facing the end of animal meat? What will it take to eliminate harmful chemicals from farming? How can a clean, climate-resilient food supply become accessible to all?

Throughout her journey, Little finds and shares a deeper understanding of the threats of climate change and encounters a sense of awe and optimism about the lessons of our past and the scope of human ingenuity.

Print length

321 pages
Language

English
Sticky notes

On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

Harmony
Publication date

June 4, 2019
File size

56969 KB
Page Flip

Enabled
Word Wise

Enabled
Enhanced typesetting

Enabled
See all details

Due to its large file size, this book may take longer to download

Dan Barber
1,008
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $14.99
Paul Hawken
411
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $12.99
Michael P. Hoffmann
21
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $8.79
Miriam Horn
95
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $9.99
Paco Underhill
56
Kindle Edition
Editors' pickBest Nonfiction
1 offer from $13.99
Paul K. Conkin
46
Kindle Edition
1 offer from $22.50

From the Publisher

pollution;food culture;culinary;sustainable;earth day;climate change;farming;global warming;nature

The Fate of Food


Alpha, America's first cloned steer.	A dried up riverbed in Ethiopia.	The maiden voyage of See & Spray, a test robot weeder in Marianna, Arkansas, equipped with eight computers, twenty-four cameras, and three large tanks of blue dyed water.

The Fate of Food


Farmers weeding in Xinjiang Province.	Agronomist Jerry Glover shows off the climate-resilient roots of Kernza, a breed of wheat derived from wild perennial wheatgrass that’s been growing on the Kansas prairie for millennia.	Impossible Foods produces faux beef by the hundreds of thousands of pounds per month.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“What we grow and how we eat are going to change radically over the next few decades. In The Fate of Food, Amanda Little takes us on a tour of the future. The journey is scary, exciting, and, ultimately, encouraging.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction

“The challenge we face is not just to feed a more populous world, but to do this sustainably and equitably. Amanda Little brings urgency, intrigue and crack reporting to the story of our food future. Devour this book — it’s a narrative feast!”—Chef José Andrés, Nobel Peace Prize nominee

“How will we feed humanity in the era of climate change? Amanda Little tackles an immense topic with grit and optimism in this fast, fascinating read. A beautifully written triumph.”—Former Secretary of State John Kerry

"The Fate of Food is a much-needed tonic at a time of division and doom saying. A riveting adventure story about a dire topic, but yet it somehow brims with optimism. Little travels around the world in hot pursuit of solutions, hell-bent on hope."—Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Emmy-award winning actress and environmentalist

"Probably the most basic question humans ever ask is, 'what's for dinner?' Amanda Little---a superb reporter---helps us imagine what the answer will be as this tough century wears on. The stories she tells with such brio are food for thought and action."—Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy

"This is a big, important book about feeding the world--but that's not why you'll read it. You'll read The Fate of Food because it's compulsively readable. Amanda Little takes you around the world and shows you things you never thought you'd be interested in, but now you can't get enough. Desalination! Who knew? You'll taste fish feed with her. You'll get airsick with her. You'll meet the strange, fascinating people who are solving some of the planet's most pressing problems. And, in the end, her optimism will become your optimism. We can do this."—Tamar Haspel, Washington Post columnist

"Necessity is the mother of invention, observed Plato. Amanda Little investigates how environmental and population pressures are spurring innovation on a grand scale -- with perhaps higher stakes and longer odds than history has ever seen. This is a big, sweeping story told with heart and rigor, as ambitious as it is accessible."—Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Lion

"Perhaps the greatest challenge of our century will be providing nutritious diets to 10 billion people without destroying what is left of the biosphere. Can we do it? Yes. But Amanda Little shows us that success will look nothing like today’s food system. The Fate of Food is spectacular. The stories are beautifully woven together and filled with curiosity, openness to new ideas, and compelling insights. This book is funny, smart, dogma-free, incredibly educational, and I think will end up being an enormously valuable contribution to the world."—Samuel Myers, professor and principal researcher, Harvard University Center for the Environment

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

A Taste of Things to Come

Plenty sits still, hunger is a wanderer.

—South African proverb

This book grew out of some seeds I planted in my backyard garden in April 2013. The diehards among you may recognize that previous sentence, which echoes a line in the introduction to Michael Pollan’s classic The Botany of Desire, a book that inspired garden lust in me and many other readers. But my seeds and Pollan’s yielded different results. His bourgeoned; mine bombed.

First, they sprouted and, as seeds miraculously do, grew to be fifty and a hundred times their original size. They produced glossy green leaves and the advanced stages of fruit before things took a turn. The garden had been partly my idea, partly my kids’. They’d been raising herbs and cherry tomatoes in planter boxes on their school playground, and wanted to try it on a larger scale at home. It didn’t take much convincing—I’d already read not just Pollan but also Mark Bittman, Dan Barber, Alice Waters, et al. I’d drunk down the all-natural, agave-sweetened, anti-Kool-Aid Kool-Aid. Tending our own backyard plot would slow down the rhythms of life a bit, my husband and I agreed, improve our daily vegetable intake, and offer an iPad antidote while creating a deeper bond with nature. And hadn’t I read somewhere that bonding with nature helped kids focus and improved hypothalamus activity? And family unity! This would be a good, healthy, mind-expanding, family-unifying, money-saving, world-bettering weekend activity.

Nashville, Tennessee, is a far cry from Berkeley, California, but our community teems with acts of world-bettering, especially among parents and especially in relation to food. We have expanding populations of backyard farmers and vegans and Paleolithic dieters and people who raise their own chickens. I have good friends who would rent an ox and a Mesopotamian plow to get closer to the ancient roots of their nourishment if they could, so deep is their food nostalgia. I am nowhere near this serious about my own family’s diet. I love a good farmers’ market, but I mostly shop at my local Kroger and have no qualms about feeding my kids out-of-season fruit or, for that matter, the public-school lunch. We buy organic when we’re feeling flush, which means we often don’t, and we go through at least half a dozen mass-produced apples a week—the kind of fruit dismissed by critics as overengineered sugar bombs. Still, I’m prone to nostalgia for a time before industrial agribusiness, for the bygone era of heirloom flavors that farmers’ markets and backyard gardeners are trying to protect.

So that spring of 2013, we went all in, sinking hundreds of dollars into a fenced-in ten-by-fourteen-foot raised bed, a small mountain of compost, tomato cages, fish-oil fertilizers, and crates of organic and heirloom seedlings, only to discover that I’m the gardening equivalent of tone-deaf. Two months after planting day, I stood inside my chicken-wire fence, scanning the wilting husks of half a dozen once promising cornstalks, a patch of elephantine cucumbers, one the width of a raccoon, and an aphid infestation in five tomato plants that had merged into a unified organism. The evidence was clear that I’m no better suited to growing my family’s food than I am to repairing a circuit board. An idea that had originally seemed eminently practical—a twenty-first-century victory garden—proved, for our family at least, to be not very practical at all.

It isn’t basic knowledge that I lack, it’s time, vigilance, and good judgment. I have some unique handicaps, admittedly. Pruning edible plants feels to me like a mild form of infanticide—I avoid it, along with the slugs, mites, aphids, and stinkbugs, and the application of whatever organic pesticides might deter them. The mosquitoes get so bad in our backyard that they, combined with the seething summer heat of Middle Tennessee, often dissuade me from watering and weeding. And when I do get up the courage to tackle weeds, I often can’t distinguish them from the seedlings and let them grow.

Even now, many years after that first failed attempt at edible gardening, we’re still trying to raise vegetables in our backyard plot. The results have improved a bit with help from my husband and kids, who have become more reliable farmhands. But if I’m honest, we haven’t produced much in the way of reliable or abundant dividends. The garden ultimately costs us more than it saves. We keep at it because it makes us feel good. It engages the senses, connects us to the land we live on, looks nice at a safe distance, and the presence of it calms my concerns about, if not a secure food supply, then about the broader impacts of technology on our lives.

And it turned out that first garden had managed to be generative—not of food but of questions, such as: How will we fix a failing food system if we can’t necessarily rely on a critical mass of enlightened, vegetarian, non-GMO, organic-only, backyard-harvesting consumers to do so from the ground up? It also got me exploring the history of agriculture and the technologies that have transformed it along the way. I learned that the food-growing efforts of individual producers have been riddled with hardships and impracticalities since, well, the beginning of human civilization.

The year is 4000 BC, and we’re not too far from present-day Baghdad. A Mesopotamian farmer is growing wheat on a farm located somewhere between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. He (or maybe she) is hitching an animal to a tool that looks a lot like a hoe but is really a protoplow. At this point, humans are about six thousand years into food cultivation, and there’s no consensus theory (six millennia later, there still isn’t) to explain how and why we made the move as a species from plant-gathering to plant-taming. But if you asked her, this wheat farmer might tell you it’s simple—because her family liked staying put. (Or maybe her kids, like mine, came home one day wanting to plant what they’d seen growing.)

There’s little dispute among archaeologists that farming made it possible for settlements, and ultimately for civilizations, to thrive over time. But there’s also evidence that many settlements predated farming. There were religious sites with temples and permanent dwellings established long before the first cultivated crops appeared. Places such as Pikimachay in western Peru and Gobekli Tepe in eastern Turkey were located, circa 10,000 BC, near fishable rivers or in regions where the food supply was easy pickings. Wild sources of grains, fruits, and protein were abundant and reliable—until they weren’t. A drought or blight may have come along, or the populations outgrew the wild food supply, and the settlers had to find ways to make do with whatever edible plants remained.

We’ll probably never know who pushed the first seeds into the soil and tended those original harvests, or exactly why, but it’s clear that by the time we got to prehistoric Mesopotamia, humans had by and large decided that it’s better to grow than to gather what you need. We stopped wandering the natural world and began to shape it. Migratory lifestyles gave way to settled societies. Ancient economies began to form. Fertility rates shot up, and populations expanded. Larger families were easier to care for when you weren’t constantly on the move, and more offspring meant extra hands in the fields.

In his book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, historian Yuval Noah Harari writes, “We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin domus, which means ‘house.’ Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the sapiens.”

But as houses were built and populations soared, nutrition declined. Farming radically narrowed the diversity of available foods. Foragers had subsisted on a varied, protein-rich diet, but now farmers were living off of whatever limited monocultures of grain they could produce. Bioarchaeologists have found lesions on the skulls of the settlers in early farming societies, indicating severe iron deficiencies, along with evidence of stunting from poor nutrition. The first farming populations were almost invariably shorter than their hunter-gatherer predecessors and more vulnerable to disease. They dealt with longer and more grueling workdays. Farming required land clearing, hoeing, planting, weeding, warding off pests, harvesting, storing, and distributing the food—more calorie-intensive labor than gathering wild bounty.

Drudgery and hunger provided a motive for developing tools. The Columbia University historian Ruth DeFries explains it this way: “Every new agricultural tool introduced since the first farming settlements has been designed with the same goal: to coax more food from the earth with less human effort.” This is useful context as we consider how we’ll feed a hotter, more populous world in the coming decades. Humans have now spent the better part of ten thousand years developing a succession of tools to this end, all of them temporary solutions that, generation after generation, get replaced or upgraded to work on larger scales. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07H722YDQ
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harmony (June 4, 2019)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 4, 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 56969 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 321 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #614,234 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #60 in Agriculture Industry (Kindle Store)
- #101 in Sustainable Agriculture (Kindle Store)
- #287 in Agriculture Industry (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.5 365 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Amanda Little

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Amanda Little is a professor of journalism and Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University. Her reporting on energy, technology and the environment has taken her to ultra-deep oil rigs, down manholes, and inside monsoon clouds. Amanda's work has appeared in the New York Times, Wired, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and elsewhere. She writes, bikes, and is learning to cook and tango in Nashville, TN, where she lives with her husband and kids. More about her work at: www.amandalittle.com

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5

365 global ratings

5 star
4 star
3 star
2 star
1 star

How customer reviews and ratings work

Reviews with images

See all photos

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Niko smiley

An Excellent Novel that shapes a broader perspective on our relationship with food.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 14, 2022

Verified Purchase

Throughout reading this book I was working on an Organic Farm, which had largely shaped my focus on food production and distribution. But as I know as as many of you know, that is just one facet of the entire industry, and Amanda Little does an excellent job in exploring, and explaining, the various issues humanity will be facing. What I find especially enthralling is that she explores many different perspectives through meeting different industry professionals, and that gives us insight on how they may engage with one another.

Helpful

MAHADEVAN RAMACHANDRAN

It's engaging written to raise awareness on a very important issue

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 30, 2020

Verified Purchase

Food/agriculture is a big part of climate change and usually gets ignored in popular imagination due to greater attention around Tesla cars, wind farms in California, or even Solar panels in the Arabian desert. However, they account for 25% of the global emissions and are likely to rise (especially livestock emissions), if current production and distribution methods are used to scale up to meet demand, which is likely to go up by 50 to 100% in the next 3 decades. This book does a very good job of not taking sides, looking at multiple interventions seeking to address this problem. It also takes a simple approach to explaining things, which should be accessible to most folks, even those not in the thick of climate change work. But more importantly, food is something personal and important to all of us. Beyond the obvious climate change implications, it is also nice to see the book take a personal look at food from those who produce it to those who consume it.

Helpful

ChrisChris

Food must change in response to climate change

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 6, 2022

Verified Purchase

This book encourages the reader to think outside the box about how good must change in the future. Excellent book

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 2, 2021

Verified Purchase

This book was on our book club list, and I was not disappointed with the content. In fact, the way the author structured the chapters and presented the information gave me some relief to know there are actually more actions being taken to address the climate mess we’ve created and how various food industry segments are taking steps to acknowledge and address the issues surrounding their segment of the food market. When I reads books like this, I am excited and encouraged for our future as stewards of this planet.

Helpful

Nancy S.

Bought new and the cover was torn

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 15, 2023

Verified Purchase

Bought this book "new" and just received it today (01/14/2023). The cover was torn.

Helpful

Adam Gonnerman

Bleak Truths and Informed Optimism

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 16, 2019

Verified Purchase

The Fate of Food takes the reader on a trip with the author through 11 countries and 13 states, meeting people working various angles of food supply. We learn about plant-based meat, GMOs, the drastic impacts of climate change on nearly the entire food industry throughout the world, and much more. By telling a story, Amanda Little manages to convey a great deal of information without losing the reader's attention. I finished the book within a week, and feel I've gained a bit more perspective on the problems we face. This book is honest about the bleaker truths while communicating at the same time an informed optimism.

7 people found this helpful

Helpful

Wayne D. Cox

There is hope on the horizon.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 9, 2021

Verified Purchase

Interesting on the work going on to feed the world.

Helpful

Barbara C. Cole

Excellent read by knowledgeable and caring author

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 26, 2020

Verified Purchase

This is not only a must read for anyone concerned about food in the future but it is an enjoyable read. The author, whose research took her to eleven countries, knows about what she is writing.

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Anita mcardle

Great read

Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on November 17, 2019

Verified Purchase

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book

Rob Sedgwick

Amazing breadth of research

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 18, 2021

Verified Purchase

The author has written 14 chapters in this book and every one of them has required to go out and meet people, spend a.lot of time with them and understand in some detail what they are doing. The result is a collection of long articles rather than a book with an overriding theme. Some of the strongest and most amazing chapters are in the middle. I read it in order but there is no need to particularly. If even a quarter of these things come to pass on a big way the world will be a profoundly different place.

2 people found this helpful

Ansgar Eussner

New food systems

Reviewed in France 🇫🇷 on March 2, 2021

Verified Purchase

Updates of technical developments for various food systems, from apple orchards to fish farms, from genetically modified grains to cultured meat and from conserved food rations for soldiers to organic permaculture, always combining the search for healthy, nutritious and affordable food with the latest research and technology - illustrating the future of food and eating.

Amazon Music Stream millions of songs	Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers	6pm Score deals on fashion brands	AbeBooks Books, art & collectibles	ACX Audiobook Publishing Made Easy	Sell on Amazon Start a Selling Account

Amazon Business Everything For Your Business	Amazon Fresh Groceries & More Right To Your Door	AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally	Home Services Experienced Pros Happiness Guarantee	Amazon Ignite Sell your original Digital Educational Resources	Amazon Web Services Scalable Cloud Computing Services

Audible Listen to Books & Original Audio Performances	Book Depository Books With Free Delivery Worldwide	Box Office Mojo Find Movie Box Office Data	ComiXology Thousands of Digital Comics	DPReview Digital Photography	Fabric Sewing, Quilting & Knitting

Goodreads Book reviews & recommendations	IMDb Movies, TV & Celebrities	IMDbPro Get Info Entertainment Professionals Need	Kindle Direct Publishing Indie Digital & Print Publishing Made Easy	Amazon Photos Unlimited Photo Storage Free With Prime	Prime Video Direct Video Distribution Made Easy

Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands	Amazon Warehouse Great Deals on Quality Used Products	Whole Foods Market America’s Healthiest Grocery Store	Woot! Deals and Shenanigans	Zappos Shoes & Clothing	Ring Smart Home Security Systems

eero WiFi Stream 4K Video in Every Room	Blink Smart Security for Every Home	Neighbors App Real-Time Crime & Safety Alerts	Amazon Subscription Boxes Top subscription boxes – right to your door	PillPack Pharmacy Simplified	Amazon Renewed Like-new products you can trust

Buy for others

Buying and sending eBooks to others

Follow the Author

The Fate of Food: What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World Kindle Edition

Customers who read this book also read

From the Publisher

The Fate of Food

The Fate of Food

Editorial Reviews

Review

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

About the Author

Product details

Videos for this product

The Fate of Food: What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World

About the author

Amanda Little

Customer reviews

Reviews with images

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries