We Want Real Food

In the same tradition as Planck's Real Food: What to Eat and Why, and Pollon's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, this was a great read. Harvey takes the reader through the history of farming's last sixty years, stripping away the false understandings that consumers and even farmers have about the impossibility of growing anything without the use of chemicals. With wonderful inserts sprinkled throughout the chapters, Harvey illuminates his words with anecdotes and stories about farmers and scientists. His main point is to show how the soil-- the base unit that goes into the life of all our plants, and through them into the life of the animals and eventually humans-- has been so degraded by the onslaught of chemicals and misunderstood farming techniques, that food is no longer as healthy as it should be, stripped of the base minerals and nutrients once found in abundance. Not a message of doom and gloom, however, Harvey lays down steps consumers can make to help influence the changes needed to bring our way of farming back to equilibrium with nature and in doing so help to protect our own health and environment. A wonderful read for anyone interested in how our food gets to our plates.