Eating Tomorrow

Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food

A major new book that shows the world already has the tools to feed itself, without expanding industrial agriculture or adopting genetically modified seeds, from the Small Planet Institute expert

“There is no we who feed the world. The world is mainly fed by hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers who grow 70 percent of developing countries’s food.”
—from Eating Tomorrow

Few challenges are more daunting than feeding a global population projected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050—at a time when climate change is making it increasingly difficult to successfully grow crops. In response, corporate and philanthropic leaders have called for major investments in industrial agriculture, including genetically modified seed technologies. Reporting from Africa, Mexico, India, and the United States, Timothy A. Wise’s Eating Tomorrow discovers how in country after country agribusiness and its well-heeled philanthropic promoters have hijacked food policies to feed corporate interests.

Most of the world, Wise reveals, is fed by hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers, people with few resources and simple tools but a keen understanding of what to grow and how. These same farmers—who already grow more than 70 percent of the food eaten in developing countries—can show the way forward as the world warms and population increases. Wise takes readers to remote villages to see how farmers are rebuilding soils with ecologically sound practices and nourishing a diversity of native crops without chemicals or imported seeds. They are growing more and healthier food; in the process, they are not just victims in the climate drama but protagonists who have much to teach us all.

Praise

Eating Tomorrow is a wake-up call about the future of food.”
—Vandana Shiva, author of Who Really Feeds the World? and Soil Not Oil
“I recommend Eating Tomorrow to anyone who wants to understand how the industrial food system is destroying our health, biosphere, and food culture.”
—Million Belay, coordinator, Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa
Eating Tomorrow is a tour de force on the global struggle for economic, social, and cultural rights, guided by a writer who takes us into corporate boardrooms and farmers’ fields.”
—Salil Shetty, former secretary general, Amnesty International, and currently senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy
“There is a battle for the future of food, and Eating Tomorrow shifts the frontlines.”
—Oliver De Schutter, co-chair, International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, and former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food
“Wise exposes our consuming obsession with corporate agriculture.”
—Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet
“Wise’s writing is riveting.”
—Ricardo J. Salvador, director and senior scientist, Food & Environment Program, Union of Concerned Scientists
“Tim Wise’s Eating Tomorrow reveals the stunning disconnect between what is needed to address future food shocks and the scheme by multinational corporations to squeeze every penny from the poorest people in the world.”
—Wenonah Hauter, author of Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America and executive director of Food & Water Watch

News and Reviews

U.S. Right to Know

Eating Tomorrow tops U.S. Right to Know’s list of the Best 2019 Books and Movies About Our Food System

Nature

"[I]n Eating Tomorrow, Timothy Wise writes a powerful polemic against agricultural technology that is sold to developing countries as progress towards the common good, but that ends up as a tool of agribusiness oligopoly and profit."

Goodreads Reviews