Tag: agriculture

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#BookReview: Feed The People by Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg

Food – Like Reading – Is Not Political, Despite Authors’ Claims. I came into this book expecting a more science/ tech look at why industrial food is good (it is, and the authors are correct on this) and how it can be made better… and instead got a book focused almost entirely on the politics of the food industry and why the authors think that the small food/ farm to table crowd ala Michael Pollan and others is wrong. While I tend to agree with the authors in outcome, their reasoning here was extremely elitist and pro-totalitarian-government-intervention, with nearly every recommendation they make ultimately coming down to “government should dictate either specific actions or at worst the range of choices that businesses and consumers will have available to them”.

Given that one of the authors works in NYC and the other in Europe, perhaps this is understandable cultural bias, and perhaps you, the reader of my review, will agree with their reasonings as well as their outcomes. But for myself, a former Libertarian Party official who tends to agree more with the writings of Ayn Rand and Lysander Spooner… yeah, there wasn’t much here I could actually endorse myself. 😉

Ultimately, it isn’t the specific direction they chose but the sheer fact that they considered these recommendations the only possible policies and did not even allow for the possibility of other possibilities that lost a star. I love finding texts that come from different perspectives, but I expect *any* nonfiction book to at least mention other potential views and why they are more easily dismissed in the views of the author(s), and this simply wasn’t done here – making the overall text have at minimum an appearance of elitism. Again, your mileage will absolutely vary there, and I know people personally who will five star this book as among the most important food books you will ever read and people who will wish they could give this same book zero stars as utter trash that should never be read by anyone *for exactly the same reasonings* that I’m ultimately winding up in the middle of the road there.

Oh yeah, kind of gave away that there was another star deduction coming there, right? This is one long time readers of my reviews will be quite familiar with in my reviews of nonfiction books – the bibliography simply wasn’t long enough, clocking in at just 10% of the overall text here. The applicability of the Sagan Standard (“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”) is perhaps debatable given the ultimate discussions of this book, but even without applying Sagan, I’ve maintained for years that in my vast reading of even Advance Review Copy nonfiction books over the years, a bare minimum – by my later expanded standards – of roughly 15% documentation is needed to get this star, and as noted, that is actually expanded , as for many years I required a bare minimum of 20%. So yeah, 10% simply isn’t going to cut it there.

Still, for all this, read this book. Seriously. You may want to defenestrate it because it openly embraces unions and calls for more of them. You may want to defenestrate it because it says openly and honestly that if we are going to provide meat for billions of people, industrialized animal farming is the only realistic way that is going to happen. But you should read it anyway, no matter your own political persuasions, because ultimately this *is* a pretty realistic book looking at exactly how we can feed the masses going forward, even if it is an extremely pro-government-mandate and anti-individual liberty view.

Oh, and I repeat the title, since the authors were so adamant in the opposing view: Food is **NOT** political.

Recommended.

This review of Feed The People by Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg was originally written on January 29, 2026.

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#BookReview: Sea Of Grass by Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty

Seemingly Comprehensive Review Of Its Field Marred By Dearth Of Bibliography. This is one of those books you pick up randomly because “hey, I don’t actually know more than the very rough basics about the American Prairie”, and it will actually give you a largely well rounded view of the entire topic, from its ancient origins and pre-European development through the Indian Wars/ Manifest Destiny era and through the Dust Bowl years all the way up to mostly current farming tech/ practices in the region. Yes, the commentary is titled perhaps a touch toward the left side of the dial, but honestly it wasn’t anywhere near as pervasive or preachy as some other similar texts tend to get, so eh, it was enough to mention here but now I’m moving on.

No, the real problem, at least with the Advance Review Copy edition I read roughly 6 months before publication, is the dearth of a bibliography, clocking in at just 7% of the overall text – a far cry from even the 15% of my newly relaxing standard for bibliography length, much less the 20-30% of my former standard. So that’s the star deduction – for all of the facts presented, there simply isn’t anywhere near enough bibliography to back them up – much less the more editorial commentary.

Overall a seemingly strong primer on the topic, I know I learned a lot about a lot here, and I suspect many will as well. I simply wish it had been better documented.

Very much recommended.

This review of Sea Of Grass by Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty was originally written on December 3, 2024.

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#BookReview: Small Farm Republic by John Klar

Questionable Sources Mar Intriguing Premise. This book’s general premise – a strategy for the American Right to lean in to its traditional principles, ignore “Climate Change”, and yet still manage to out-green the American Left – is a truly intriguing idea, one Klar has clearly put quite a bit of thought into. His general plan does in fact read like a Republican was trying to put together exactly that type of plan, but in a fairly realistic, “this is actually politically viable” manner. (Rather than the “pie in the sky” so many demagogues of all stripes generally propose.)

What calls this book into question are the sources it uses – two, in fact, that I’ve reviewed before and which have proven to be questionable themselves (Chris Smaje’s October 2020 book A Small Farm Future and Shanna Swan and Stacey Colino’s February 2021 book Count Down). Citing either one as what the author considers to be legitimate evidence would be enough for a star deduction on its own, and thus the two star deduction here.

This review of Small Farm Republic by John Klar was originally written on April 1, 2023.

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#BookReview: A Homestead Holiday by Elizabeth Bromke

Complex And Short Tale. Bromke manages to show that if a storyteller is truly great, they can manage to pack quite a bit of complexity into a still short-ish (seemingly less than 200 page) book. Here, Bromke manages to show a teacher’s passion for her particular craft, a son’s devastation over losing his father, and how the two can come together in some very unexpected ways. Heck, she even manages to toss in elements reminiscent of Mr. Holland’s Opus (without the actual concert). And again, all in a short-ish book and *while still telling a compelling romance tale* to boot! Truly excellent work. Very much recommended.

This review of A Homestead Holiday by Elizabeth Bromke was originally written on November 1, 2022.

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#BookReview: Animal Vegetable Junk by Mark Bittman

Mostly Junk, Barely Any Meat. This anti-capitalist, anti-European, anti-agriculture screed is little more than a run down of a leftist view of world history (with concentrations in the post-Industrial Revolution world) as it relates to food . It often points to old and out-dated research in support of its claims, and its bibliography is both scant – barely 1/3 the size of similar nonfiction titles – and not cited in the text at all. (Instead, it uses a system of referring to a particular phrase on a particular page number inside the bibliography itself, rather than having a notation in the text of the narrative. Which is obfuscation intended to hide the text’s lack of scholarly merit, clearly.) For those who know no better, it perhaps offers an argument that will at least confirm their own biases. But for anyone who has studied any of the several areas it touches in any depth at all, its analysis is flawed due to the very premises it originates from. All of this to say, this is a very sad thing. Based on the description of the book, I genuinely had high hopes for it, as food and its history and future is something that truly fascinates me and this could have been a remarkable text. Instead, it is remarkable only for how laughable it is. Not recommended.

This review of Animal Vegetable Junk by Mark Bittman was originally written on October 15, 2020.

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#BookReview: A Small Farm Future by Chris Smaje

Wildly … Imaginative… Reasoning, Close Yet Still Incorrect Conclusion. Most any math teacher (even former ones like myself) have stories of situations where when told to “show their work”, a student somehow has so-incorrect-as-to-nearly-be-incomprehensible reasoning, but somehow still manages to wind up at an answer that is close but still not quite correct. Maybe a decimal point in the wrong position, but the right actual digits in the right sequence, for example. Another example relevant here would be a space mission to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa that somehow launches when Jupiter is at its furthest point from Earth and launches away from Jupiter (or any reasonable path to the planet) to boot… and yet still manages to wind up on Callisto – another of the Galilean Moons of Jupiter with similar properties, though not the originally intended target and not as rich in desired attributes for the science aboard the mission.

This is effectively what Smaje has done here. More conservative readers may not make it even halfway into the first chapter, which is little more than a *very* thinly veiled anti-capitalist diatribe. Even more liberal/ progressive readers will have some tough pills to swallow with Smaje’s ardent defense of at least some forms of private property as the chief means of achieving his goals. And at the end, Smaje does in fact manage to do at least some version of what he sets out to do – make some level of a case for A Small Farm Future. The case Smaje makes here is indeed intriguing, despite being so deeply flawed, and absolutely worthy of further examination and discussion. It seems that he is simply too blinded by his own political and philosophical backgrounds to truly make the case as it arguably should have been made. Recommended.

This review of A Small Farm Future by Chris Smaje was originally written on August 26, 2020.