Food Fight: GMOs and the Future of the American Diet
Written by Mckay Jenkins
Narrated by Robert Fass
5/5
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About this audiobook
Are GMOs really that bad? A prominent environmental journalist takes a fresh look at what they actually mean for our food system and for us.
In the past two decades, GMOs have come to dominate the American diet. Advocates hail them as the future of food, an enhanced method of crop breeding that can help feed an ever-increasing global population and adapt to a rapidly changing environment. Critics, meanwhile, call for their banishment, insisting GMOs were designed by overeager scientists and greedy corporations to bolster an industrial food system that forces us to rely on cheap, unhealthy, processed food so they can turn an easy profit. In response, health-conscious brands such as Trader Joe's and Whole Foods have started boasting that they are "GMO-free," and companies like Monsanto have become villains in the eyes of average consumers.
Where can we turn for the truth? Are GMOs an astounding scientific breakthrough destined to end world hunger? Or are they simply a way for giant companies to control a problematic food system?
Environmental writer McKay Jenkins traveled across the country to answer these questions and discovered that the GMO controversy is more complicated than meets the eye. He interviewed dozens of people on all sides of the debate--scientists hoping to engineer new crops that could provide nutrients to people in the developing world, Hawaiian papaya farmers who credit GMOs with saving their livelihoods, and local farmers in Maryland who are redefining what it means to be "sustainable." The result is a comprehensive, nuanced examination of the state of our food system and a much-needed guide for consumers to help them make more informed choices about what to eat for their next meal.
Mckay Jenkins
McKay Jenkins has been writing about humans and the natural world for just as long. His most recent book is What's Gotten Into Us: Staying Healthy in a Toxic World, was hailed as "a Silent Spring for the human body" (--Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone). Jenkins is the Cornelius Tilghman Professor of English, Journalism and Environmental Humanities at the University of Delaware, where he has won the Excellence in Teaching Award.
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Reviews for Food Fight
6 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I was surprised that Jenkins didn't toss his hat into one or the other camp. Although he noted that gene insertion and its consequences are not as simple and straightforward as Monsanto would like us to believe, he seemed to keep his mind open to benefits. Chapter 4, though, was a bloody indictment of biotech practices in Hawaii, where most of the herbicide resistant crops are developed and grown for seed. In order to prove their resistance, they are subjected to mountain of herbicides, which are not disclosed to the local public, not even for medical treatment of exposures. Hawaiians have been trying to reclaim their rights to clean air soil and water, and have been shut out all the way. Jenkins critiques the entire agro-chemical system, and offers many many alternative paradigms that are being developed. This was an excellent, thoughtful book.
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