1) The Omnivore's Dilemma: A natural history of four meals, by Michael Pollan.
I list this first in part because I'm reading it currently, and partly because it goes into so much detail about what's wrong with our current industrial food system -- with digressions into resource depletion, greenhouse gases, globalism, biofuels, and other related topics. The health of plants, animals, people, the land, and communities are all covered, and in an engaging and at times even gripping style. Pollan's book clearly illlustrates the ecological principle that "everything is connected to everything else." More than you ever wanted to know about what most Americans are eating these days, and even many of us who consider ourselves fairly aware are probably eating more often than we should... I certainly am. But I know a lot of things I'm not going to be eating, after reading this!
2) Real Food: What to eat and why, by Nina Planck.
Just a heckuva neat book by someone who sounds like a heckuva neat lady, and who is also a successful entrepreneur, in the area of farmers markets and local foods. As the subtitle puts it, this is about what you should eat and why you should eat it. Here's a sample, just to give a "flavor" of the book:
"Does that mean you should enjoy real bacon and butter not because they're tasty but because they're actually healthy? In a word, yes. Some might mock this as a characteristically American case for real food -- call it the Virtue Defense. [...] Someone else -- a French chef perhaps -- might take a different approach in defense of real food. Less interested in health, he might champion pleasure for its own sake. Great -- I'm all for pleasure. If the sheer sensual pleasure of eating shirred eggs or homemade ice cream is enough for you to shed your guilt, throw away phony industrial foods, and return to eating real foods, all the better. I'll leave the nature of taste and satisfaction, guilt and pleasure to the cultural critics and moral philosophers. This book is about why real food is good for you."3) The Long Emergency: Surviving the converging catastrophes of the 21st century, by James Howard Kunstler.
"Sobering" doesn't begin to describe this book. It's flat-out scary. Forget Stephen King, if you want to stay up all night in sheer terror, read Kunstler. But it's not a thriller, it's his insightful discussion of how the approach (if not current fact) of peak oil -- the point at which we are extracting as much oil as we will ever extract, world-wide -- and the subsequent decline in supply and increase in price, will change the way we live, forever. Everything about contemporary American society, from suburbia to surgical supplies, not to mention our food chain, is abjectly dependent upon cheap, plentiful fossil fuels. And that era is over, as what is left will become ever more difficult and expensive to extract, particularly since "much of it is located in countries whose people hate us," as Kunstler ruefully notes. The upshot? Expect significant contraction in all areas of American society, as local communities become not a choice, but a necessity. Want to know more? Read the book!
Note 1: If you absolutely don't have time to read the whole book (you don't have to read it all at once, ferpitysakes), at least read the article-length adaption published by Rolling Stone.
Note 2: I saw Kunstler and heard him speak at the 2007 PASA Conference in February; he is just as inspirational and motivational (in a kick-your-butt sort of way) in person as he is in print, but less curmudgeonly: he comes across as a genuinely decent guy who is genuinely concerned about the way our society seems determined to go. Sssh! Just don't tell him I said so. I think he likes his bad-boy image...
4) Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats, by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig, Ph.D.
Sally Fallon is the president of the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF, for short) and Mary Enig is a brilliant but iconoclastic lipids researcher from the University of Maryland. Together, they do a bang-up good job of explaining why most of what you thought you knew about diet and nutrition is completely incorrect... okay, that's too gentle: flat-out wrong. Following in the footsteps of dentist and peripatetic entho-nutritionist Weston A. Price, DDS, Fallon and Enig encourage us to adopt the dietary wisdom of traditional societies, cultures and communities where people regularly lived long, healthy, and productive lives eating whole, natural, and unprocessed foods -- including organ meats, full-fat (and raw) dairy, and other "healthy fats." Vegetables aren't left out of the equation, both in fresh and fermented forms, but Nourishing Traditions points out that there were no traditional vegan societies, and mostly-vegetarian ones invariably supplemented their diets with animal protein and fat in some form. This book is indeed food for thought and body alike.
5) The Untold Story of Milk, by Dr. Ron Schmidt, ND.
Ron Schmidt is a naturopathic doctor who cured himself of digestive and other ailments by adopting a diet rich in raw milk and other un-processed, un-pasteurized dairy products. That led him to an exploration of the history and culture of milk consumption, and especially the industrialization and mandatory pasteurization of our contemporary milk supply. Combining muck-raking journalism with a paean to holistic nutrition and small-scale, natural farming, Schmidt illustrates clearly why pasteurization is so essential in the mass-market commercial milk industry... and why raw milk and other dairy products are not only a viable alternative, when obtained from herds of healthy, grass-fed cows, but strongly supportive of -- perhaps even essential to -- good health.
I could go on and on about other books that have influenced my life, or at least my outlook on life -- and I may post another "top five" somewhere down the road. But these are not only interesting and well-written, but (I believe) timely and incredibly important. I strongly recommend you hie yourself to the local library or bookstore and obtain copies. And when you've read them, I look forward to any feedback or discussion thus generated!
Bonus Book:
If you've stuck with me this far, I may as well add a "bonus" that could just as easily be in the Top 5 in terms of influential -- the only reason I didn't put it there to start with was that it reaffirmed things I already believed rather than challenged or changed my outlook. But who knows? It might just change yours:
The Last Child in the Woods: Overcoming Nature-Deficit Disorder, by Richard Louv.
This book makes a strong, well-researched, well-reasoned case for something that a lot of us have known intuitively and out of personal experience for a long time: that children need to be outside, playing and having what sociologists and educational researchers call "authentic personal experiences" in the natural world. As Louv puts it, "Healing the broken bond between our young and nature is in our self-interest, not only because aesthetics or justice demand it, but also because our mental, physical, and spiritual health depend upon it." Certainly the mental, physical, and spiritual health of children depends to a large measure, as this book makes abundantly clear, upon direct personal contact with nature during childhood. And that kind of positive child-nature contact may also be vital for nature, as the children of today will be the decision-makers of tomorrow. As G.M. Trevelyan wrote many years ago, "We are all children of the earth. Unelss our spirits can be refreshed by at least intermittent contact with nature, we grow awry." Likely much of the "growing awry" we see in many of today's children and youth can be traced by precisely to what Louv calls "nature-deficit disorder." Want to make a positive difference? Visit the Children & Nature Network to see what you can do.
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