Book cover of The Oldest Cure in the World: Adventures in the Art and Science of Fasting by Steve Hendricks
Food & Wine

The Oldest Cure in the World: Adventures in the Art and Science of Fasting

A journalist delves into the history, science, and practice of fasting, an ancient cure enjoying a dynamic resurgence.

When should we eat, and when shouldn’t we? The answers to these simple questions are not what you might expect. As Steve Hendricks shows in The Oldest Cure in the World, stop eating long enough, and you’ll set in motion cellular repairs that can slow aging and prevent and reverse diseases like diabetes and hypertension. […Learn More]

Book cover of Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation by Amanda Ciafone
Business & Money

Counter-Cola: A Multinational History of the Global Corporation

Counter-Cola charts the history of one of the world’s most influential and widely known corporations, The Coca-Cola Company. Over the past 130 years, the corporation has sought to make its products, brands, and business central to daily life in over 200 countries. Amanda Ciafone uses this example of global capitalism to reveal the pursuit of corporate power within the key economic transformations—liberal, developmentalist, neoliberal—of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. […Learn More]

Book cover of Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Plane by George Monbiot
Biological Sciences

Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Plane

For the first time in millennia, we have the opportunity to transform not only our food system but our entire relationship to the living world.
 
Farming is the world’s greatest cause of environmental destruction—and the one we are least prepared to talk about. We criticize urban sprawl, but farming sprawls across thirty times as much land. We have plowed, fenced, and grazed great tracts of the planet, felling forests, killing wildlife, and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves. Yet millions still go hungry and the price of food is rising faster than ever. […Learn More]

Book cover of Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial by Corban Addison
Business & Money

Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial 

The once idyllic coastal plain of North Carolina is home to a close-knit, rural community that for more than a generation has battled the polluting practices of large-scale farming taking place in its own backyard. After years of frustration and futility, an impassioned cadre of local residents, led by a team of intrepid and dedicated lawyers, filed a lawsuit against one of the world’s most powerful companies—and, miraculously, they won. […Learn More]

Book cover of Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by Dan Saladino
Food & Wine

Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them

Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction is the prominent broadcaster’s pathbreaking tour of the world’s vanishing foods and his argument for why they matter now more than ever

Over the past several decades, globalization has homogenized what we eat, and done so ruthlessly. The numbers are stark: Of the roughly six thousand different plants once consumed by human beings, only nine remain major staples today. Just three of these—rice, wheat, and corn—now provide fifty percent of all our calories. Dig deeper and the trends are more worrisome still: […Learn More]

Earth Sciences

Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey

The New York Times bestselling author of The Shepherd’s Life chronicles his family’s farm across three generations, revealing through this intimate lens the profound global transformation of agriculture and of the human relationship to the land.

As a boy, James Rebanks’s grandfather taught him to work the land the old way. Their family farm in England’s Lake District hills was part of an ancient agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. And yet, by the time James inherited the farm, it was barely recognizable. […Learn More]

Earth Sciences

We Are The Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast

In We Are the Weather, Jonathan Safran Foer explores the central global dilemma of our time in a surprising, deeply personal, and urgent new way.

Some people reject the fact, overwhelmingly supported by scientists, that our planet is warming because of human activity. But do those of us who accept the reality of human-caused climate change truly believe it? […Learn More]