The Real Food Revival or Consuming The Inedible

The Real Food Revival: Aisle by Aisle, Morsel by Morsel

Author: Sherri Brooks Vinton

Say good-bye to flavorless tomatoes, mealy apples, and "mystery meats." Say helloto the way food used to taste-and still can.

The Real Food Revival is a book of celebration and indulgence, an ode to culinary delight, and an indispensable reference guide for food lovers everywhere. It takes you through the delicious process of filling your pantries (and tummies) with Real Food. Simply put, Real Food is: delicious, produced as locally as possible, sustainable, affordable, and accessible.

In The Real Food Revival, readers will learn how to find Real Food wherever they shop, and how to navigate the jargon-organic, eco-friendly, fresh, fresh-frozen, cage-free, GMO-free, fair-trade, grass-fed, grain-finished-in order to make meaningful choices. The book also informs readers about alternative Real Food sources such as CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture systems), direct-from-the-farm, and the Internet.

Author Biography: Sherri Brooks Vinton has devoted her career to promoting the rewards of eating sustainably raised food. She is a leader of the New York Convivium of Slow Food.

Ann Clark Espuelas, a writer and editor, has worked at The Village Voice and Harper's Bazaar.

Publishers Weekly

We long for days gone by, when farmers were plentiful and prosperous, produce was free of chemicals and cows weren't mad. What can we do to return to safer, more flavorful and natural food? Vinton and Espuelas answer that question via this information-packed, well-written volume. The authors aren't dietitians, but they are excellent researchers and top-notch storytellers who love delicious food and believe it should not come at a cost to our health and to farmers' livelihood. They track the effects post-WWII industrialization has had on our food chain (sick animals, damaged land and oceans) and the unreal food that results. And they exhort us to consider that our food-shopping choices can transform not only our meals, but our landscape, society and culture, too. Profiles of independent farmers, bakers and cheese makers are inspiring (and include contact information). Grocery store aisle-by-aisle primers on food-centric terms and labels explain, for instance, the difference between "artesian well water," "mineral water" and "spring water," or the reasons why "corn-fed beef" isn't as wholesome as it sounds. This book gives readers tools for change, offering hope for a future rife with sustainable and flavorful food. Agent, Lisa Ekus. (July) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Though billed as an "aisle-by-aisle guide to finding Real Food wherever you shop," this book can be boiled down to one sentence: buy local, organic, seasonally, and preferably not from a chain supermarket. Vinton and Espuelas, who bill themselves as "eaters" (Vinton is a leader of the New York Convivium of Slow Food, and Epueleas is a writer and editor), are not shy about their dislike for megamarts, convenience foods, and industrialized farming. While useful for its definitions, which help shoppers wade through the plethora of food-related jargon that clogs the supermarket aisles, this work is packed with debatable and often outrageous statements. The authors, for example, state that eating grain pollinated by bio-pharmed crops is a form of human cannibalism. They also contend that Real Food should be affordable, yet the artisans profiled sell products that, for the average consumer, are anything but. The overzealous tone of this book will undoubtedly alienate many potential converts to the Real Food revival. Not recommended-Pauline Baughman, Multnomah Cty. Lib., Portland, OR Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Books about: Web Redesign or Core Python Programming

Consuming The Inedible: Neglected Dimensions Of Food Choice, Vol. 5

Author: Jeremy MacClancy

Throughout the world, everyday, millions of people eat earth, clay, nasal mucus, and similar substances. Yet food practices like these are strikingly understudied in a sustained, interdisciplinary manner. This book aims to correct this neglect. Contributors, utilizing anthropological, nutritional, biochemical, psychological and health-related perspectives, examine in a rigorously comparative manner the consumption of foods conventionally regarded as inedible by most Westerners.

This book is both timely and significant because nutritionists and health care professionals are seldom aware of anthropological information on these food practices, and vice versa. Ranging across a diversity of disciplines Consuming the Inedible surveys scientific and local views about the consequences—biological, mineral, social or spiritual—of these food practices, and probes to what extent we can generalize about them.