"The Unsettling of America" is Wendell Berry's personal, dramatic inquiry into the way in which we use the land that sustains us. For the roots of our attitudes toward farming, Berry goes back to the industrial revolution, which promised freedom from physical toil, and to the "conquistador" mentality that ruled the settlement of North America, treating land, resources, and ultimately people as infinitely expendable. Out of this history comes a disturbing,...

A prominent food journalist follows the trail from Big Pizza to square tomatoes to exploding food prices to Wall Street, trying figure out why we can't all have healthy, delicious, affordable food. In 2008, farmers grew enough to feed twice the world's population, yet more people starved than ever before - and most of them were farmers. In Bet the Farm, food writer Kaufman sets out to discover the connection between the global food system and why...

Beth Hoffman was living the good life: she had a successful career as a journalist and professor, a comfortable home in San Francisco, and plenty of close friends and family. Yet in her late 40s, she and her husband decided to leave the big city and move to his family ranch in Iowa--all for the dream of becoming a farmer, to put into practice everything she had learned over decades of reporting on food and agriculture. There was just one problem:...

"A bold, science-based corrective to the groundswell of misinformation about food and how it's produced, examining in detail local and organic food, food companies, nutrition labeling, ethical treatment of animals, environmental impacts, and every other aspect from farm to table. Consumers want to know more about their food--including the farm it came from, the chemicals used, the nutrition value, how the animals were treated, and costs to the environment....