America’s Food: What You Don’t Know About What You Eat Harvey Blatt Cambridge, ma: The mit Press, 2008 384 pp. Illustrations. $29.95 (cloth) When I ask my students at the University of Calgary where their food comes from, I get many interesting answers: a styrofoam tray at Safeway; the processing plant two hours south of our city; the frozen food section at the local organic food market; the microwave; the Hutterites at the farmer’s market. To varying degrees these answers are all correct, but they also demonstrate the disconnect that many North Americans experience when they take it for granted that every night food will end up on their plates—often without thinking any further about where their food comes from. In America’s Food Harvey Blatt offers an answer to the above question in a very thorough analysis of where our food comes from and how it gets to our plates. In a book that covers all aspects of food production, from growing grain to processing beef, no question about food connections goes unanswered. Wondering how many food additives Americans eat each year? Blatt has the answer. (About 150 pounds of additives, in case you are interested.) Acreage and percentage of land planted worldwide with genetically modified organisms? Blatt knows that, too. Curious about corn production in the United States in 2006 including bushels, area harvested and yield organized by state? The book answers that question as well. Yet even though each chapter is impressively peppered with enough maps, charts, tables, graphs, and lists to make the quantitative researcher weep with joy, America’s Food is about more than statistics. Blatt also delves into the culture of food production and how the transition from family farm to factory farm led to our disconnect with what we eat. As Blatt points out in his introduction, “This book describes how food is produced in the United States and how the process, driven by the dual motivation for corporate profits and efficiency in food production, has seriously harmed human health and the environment” (p.ix). It is Blatt’s main purpose to outline as specifically as possible the route that our food takes from field to plate. None of the issues raised in Blatt’s book are new ones; Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry, Eric Schlosser, and Morgan Spurlock have all dealt with the “big, bad corporate food producers” and the demise of our relationship with food in a more thorough manner. But Blatt’s book is a one-stop tome of food facts and commentary. Chapter topics range from the plight of the family farm to the processing of the food we eat to the effects of processed food and inactivity on our health. The facts are laid bare through solid research and analysis, and Blatt’s credibility is firmly established as someone we can trust. It is the gathering of such specific information that makes America’s Food so impressive. Taken together, the research presents an overwhelming case for society to start taking notice of our food habits, from production to consumption. Blatt ends his book with a call to action that can be summed up with this assessment: “People are being poorly served by the agricultural interests that produce the food we eat” (p.267). Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl has noted that the farmer is going to replace the chef as the new foodie celebrity. Yet being aware of farmers and the work they do is not quite the same as understanding where our food comes from. For the general public, Harvey Blatt’s America’s Food is an excellent resource for connecting the dots from food production to plate. —Lisa Stowe, University of Calgary Slow Food Story: Politics and Pleasure Geoff Andrews Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008 196 pp. $75.00 (cloth). $19.95 (paper) It is not necessary to be particularly acute or observant to notice that twenty years after its founding, Slow Food has managed to capture the attention and contemporary sensibilities not only of foodies at large, but also of food studies scholars. The organization’s conscious and well-planned effort to reach out to academia and institutions of higher education has clearly paid off, both in terms of collaborations and publications. In addition to the material and books produced by the organization itself and its affiliates, various scholarly articles have analyzed its impact on consumption, on production issues, and on public perceptions of such topics as biodiversity, sustainability, and food justice. In his new book Geoff Andrews looks closely at the politics of Slow Food, both in terms of its structure and its interactions with different environments in the various countries where it has taken root. His main argument is, in his own words, that Slow Food is “a very ideological movement, with clear principles, critiques, counter-arguments and holistic programmes…it incorporates a systemic critique of the current world order (‘fast life’), embodies alternative values, and envisages a different way of ‘slow living’” (p.21). The movement is not simply oppositional but actually proposes a set of values and practices (ecogastronomy, the ‘good, clean, and fair’ principle) that in many ways challenge dominant narratives, often referring to “a strong conservative element” (p.24) in its mourning GASTRONOMICA FALL 2009

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