Diet for a Dead Planet

Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis

A timely indictment of industrial agriculture’s threat to the future of food, health, and the environment

“Stands in the classic American tradition of muckraking journalism. Cook offers an extensive and frightening catalog of the perils in our food supply.” —San Diego Union-Tribune

If we are what we eat, then, as Christopher D. Cook contends in this powerful look at the food industry, we are not in good shape. The facts speak for themselves: more than 75 million Americans suffered from food poisoning last year, and 5,000 of them died; 67 percent of American males are overweight, obesity is the second leading cause of preventable death in the United States and supersizing is just the tip of the iceberg: the way we make and eat food today is putting our environment and the very future of food at risk.

Diet for a Dead Planet takes us beyond Fast Food Nation to show how our entire food system is in crisis. Corporate control of farms and supermarkets, unsustainable drives to increase agribusiness productivity and profits, misplaced subsidies for exports, and anemic regulation have all combined to produce a grim harvest. Food, our most basic necessity, has become a force behind a staggering array of social, economic, and environmental epidemics.

Yet there is another way. Cook argues cogently for a whole new way of looking at what we eat—one that places healthy, sustainably produced food at the top of the menu for change. In the words of Jim Hightower, “If you eat, read this important book!”

Praise

“A far-reaching takedown of the American food industry . . . further explores the stomach-churning realm described by Eric Schlosser.”
Mother Jones
“Provides the big picture, along with fascinating details, to motivate change before it’s too late.”
—Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet
“A book that forces you to look at things that you took for granted. Like breakfast.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Goodreads Reviews