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.