It’s that time of year again – we’ve compiled our favourite reads from the last 12 months, enough to keep you busy until next year!

 

 

Soil to Gut: How to regenerate your health with food  

Author: Lucy Williamson; Publisher: 5M Books Ltd 

Reviewed by Victoria Halliday

Working for 15 years as both a farm and small animal vet, before training as a public health nutritionist, Dr Lucy Williamson brings a unique perspective to the relationship between food and health. 

With Soil to Gut, her aim is to help readers move beyond heavily marketed food fads towards a more grounded and joyful approach to eating. Taking a ‘whole health’ approach, Dr Williamson focuses on the gut microbiome and how it influences many aspects of our wellbeing. By understanding how different foods nourish – or deplete – us, we can create a gut environment in which beneficial microbes are better able to outcompete those that may be harmful. 

Soil to Gut shows how this science translates into everyday cooking and eating, taking readers on a journey through the main food groups and explaining how different foods interact with our bodies. At the heart of Dr Williamson’s approach is the connection between the health of our soils and the health of people. A healthy soil ecosystem drives the nutrient cycle: “the natural loop that moves nutrients from soil, through plant roots, into pasture for grazing animals or into crops that feed us”. As soils have become depleted and increasingly reliant on chemical inputs, the nutrient density of many foods has declined. Dr Williamson argues that this is one of the factors contributing to the epidemic of ‘hidden hunger’, where we consume enough calories but insufficient nutrients. She suggests that, at an individual level, we can help counter this by choosing food with a better story behind it and, at a systems level, by supporting farming practices that prioritise soil health. 

Throughout the book, Dr Williamson combines accessible explanations with practical recipes and tips that make the science easy to apply in the kitchen. Rather than prescribing a rigid way of eating, she encourages readers to build a more diverse, nourishing and enjoyable diet while thinking more deeply about where their food comes from. For anyone interested in the links between farming, food and health, Soil to Gut is an engaging, evidence-informed guide that offers practical advice alongside a compelling case for reconnecting the health of people with the health of the land. 

 

Eat the Planet Well: How to fix our toxic food system – one meal at a time

Author: Dave Goulson; Publisher: Jonathan Cape 

Reviewed by Alicia Miller 

Noted environmentalist David Goulson has written widely about the wonder of insects and their importance to our survival as humans. But in this latest book, Eat the Planet Well, he steps into much broader territory, interrogating the monumental problems of our food system which, he comments, is ‘toxic to us and toxic to our planet’. 

Food has largely become a danger to us. The arrival of ultra-processed foods, especially in the UK and US – but increasingly across the world – has led us down a path to ill health and one that it is hard to escape from. We are not only suffering from non-communicable diseases, but we are also consuming an array of pesticides and forever chemicals among other dangers, when we sit down to eat. Further, and arguably more importantly, the intensive nature of our industrial food system is not just destroying our health, it is also rampantly working to destroy our nature – and without nature, we face a denuded and devastated planet that will feed us poorly. 

Goulson covers a lot of ground in Eat the Planet Well – understanding the problems of our industrialised food system is a good starting place for changing how we eat. Farming organically with an understanding of nature’s value is vitally important. There is an essential balance that is lost when the lives of animals are degraded, plants are sprayed heavily with pesticides and soil health declines. Goulson maps out the problems step by step, helping us to think again about how we eat and what we can do to eat better. Each chapter focuses on a specific issue – Carbon, Cows and Climate Change, Should I Buy Local Food, Limited Land and Water and onwards. It’s a comprehensive analysis of what is needed to create a kinder, gentler world that will truly feed us well.

 

Reaping What She Sows: How women are rebuilding our broken food system 

Author: Nancy Matsumoto; Publisher: Melville House Publishing 

Reviewed by Victoria Halliday

To say that our industrialised food system is broken has become a familiar refrain. We hear it so often, yet supermarket shelves remain full and life carries on much as normal. It’s easy to tune out the warnings and keep filling our trolleys. After all, what is it that we’re actually able to do? 

Reaping What She Sows by Nancy Matsumoto shows that there is in fact much we can and must do, if we’re going to revive our ailing food system. The book serves as a powerful antidote to apathy, telling the stories of women around the world who are rolling up their sleeves to rebuild food and farming for the better, bringing their remarkable ingenuity, tenacity and compassion to the task. 

Matsumoto shows how cooperative movements and creative solutions have been born out of systems of oppression, and how these might energise today’s efforts to build an alternative food system in the face of Big Food oligarchies and late-stage capitalism.  Women have historically been important leaders in food production and distribution, but in many modern societies, they have been relegated to the margins of male-dominated industrialised systems. Yet it is precisely because they have been excluded from the dominant system’s centres of power that women have emerged as early adopters of progressive food system change. 

The stories that Matsumoto shares are remarkable. She meets women who have dedicated their lives to pushing for racial justice in agriculture, who are working to rebuild local grain economies, who are coordinating vertically integrated cooperatives that protect smallholders, who are forging the way in building sustainable fisheries – and many more. By exploring the messy human realities alongside the broader systems at play, Matsumoto creates a fascinating read. Reaping What She Sows is recommended for anyone seeking inspiration in their own work or simply looking for a refreshing dose of optimism and agency about the future. 

Importantly, Matsumoto reminds us that change is not only the preserve of policymakers and producers. As consumers, we also have the power to catalyse the transformation of food and farming: “Sometimes a short, ethical supply chain product is hidden in plain sight in a [megastore]. The onus is on us, the consumer, to look for companies that we know are part of the alt system we want to support.”

 

Eat Your Garden: Edimentals as a beautiful, low-effort way to grow food 

Author: Harry Holding; Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing 

Reviewed by Isabel Eaton 

For those who grow their own food, this has not been an easy summer. High temperatures combined with little to no rainfall have made the watering of thirsty fruits and vegetables a seemingly endless task and, against the backdrop of drought and hosepipe bans, one tinged with a distinct sense of unease. In gardens and allotments across the country, many will be asking themselves whether the time has come to do things differently – Harry Holding’s new book, Eat Your Garden, may well hold a solution. 

Award-winning garden designer and life-long fan of growing-your-own, Harry Holding is a passionate advocate for ‘edimentals’ – plants that look good, taste good and do good for biodiversity and the soil. Doing away with the idea that edible and ornamental plants are distinct entities, with the former often confined to the allotment or functional beds hidden at the bottom of the garden, Eat Your Garden sets out the case for putting edible plants at the heart of garden design for reasons of both sustainability and beauty. 

The benefits of perennial edibles, Harry explains, are manifold. Because they have time to develop strong root systems, they are more resilient in the face of challenging weather conditions and pests, as well as being better for the soil, improving structure and reducing disturbance. Once established, they are also lower in effort and cost as there is no need to resow and plant them each year. And with such a wide variety of plants available, they can provide just as much aesthetic interest in the garden as their non-edible equivalents. 

In this accessible and practical guide, Harry shares the profiles of some of the plants he commonly uses in his designs (from familiar favourites such as fennel and chives to many you may not have known were edible, such has Hostas and Lamb’s Ear); he explores the principles of planting design in the edimental garden, and offers insights into some of the most exciting and experimental edimental gardens from around the world. Photos throughout the book help to bring the topic to life and make this a highly readable introduction to the world of edimentals, which may well get gardeners thinking differently about how to produce food in a changing climate.

 

Eating Behind Bars: Ending the hidden punishment of food in prison 

Authors: Leslie Soble, Alex Busansky & Aishatu R. Yusuf; Publisher: New Press  

Reviewed by Imogen Crossland 

Eating Behind Bars is an essential read for anyone who wants to better understand America’s broken prison system and how it might be fixed. Winner of a James Beard Foundation Media Award, the book follows a landmark 2020 investigation of the same title, exploring the woeful state of prison food in the US. Leslie Soble and the team at Impact Justice, a US-based non-profit working to reform the criminal justice system, shed light on an issue that has, until recently, received little public attention. What goes on behind prison doors is so often out of sight, out of mind. 

Grounded in the unflinchingly honest words of incarcerated people, their family members and prison staff, the first half describes rat-infested kitchens, rotten food and drinking taps running with brown water that “sparkles” with flecks of metal. The fact that many of the people subjected to these meals are also forced to work on one of America’s industrial-scale prison farms feels especially ironic – producing food for the mass market under horrific conditions, without ever tasting it themselves. 

What follows, however, is an uplifting collection of stories: of initiatives and individuals working tirelessly to bring about change. From San Quentin prison in California, where a movement led by residents has produced a ‘Scandi-style’ plan to transform the food environment, to the ‘Chefs in Prisons’ programme in Maine, where Michelin-starred chefs swap restaurants for prison kitchens, supporting staff with menu design, local sourcing and reducing waste, these examples show what meaningful reform can look like in practice, and leave you feeling optimistic that change is possible.

The idea that ‘food is medicine’ is a powerful core message, and incarcerated people understand better than anyone the impact poor nutrition has on physical and mental health, as well as the restorative potential of good food. It’s also made clear that reforming prison systems doesn’t just benefit those inside – the effects reverberate far across families, local communities and the natural environment. 

It’s a radical book on an important issue, one that ultimately affects all of us. The following quote really captures the heart of it: “We’re not making anyone safer by wielding food as a weapon of punishment. Safety comes when people’s fundamental needs for shelter, sustenance, connection, and purpose are met, and when we treat each other with care and respect.”

 

Cheese Trekking: How microbes, landscapes, livestock and human cultures shape terroir 

Author: Trevor Wamedahl; Publisher: Chelsea Green 

Reviewed by Anna Heinlein 

Last year, I made around 900 litres of cider and perry using only the wild yeasts naturally present on the fruit. For me, that’s what terroir is all about: the microorganisms that reflect the place where the apples and pears were grown, capturing the uniqueness of an orchard and the fruits it produces. I’d always thought about terroir in relation to cider, perry and wine, but I did have a real lightbulb moment when I read Trevor Wamedahl’s Cheese Trekking– the same living microbial communities shape cheese too.  

Cheese Trekking takes you on a journey through landscapes and cultures, introducing the people, animals and environments behind some rare and remarkable cheeses. Wamedahl brings each place vividly to life, whether it’s sheep grazing through Mediterranean scrub in Italy among the deep red flowers of sulla, or herders air-drying yak milk cheese on the roofs of their ‘gers’ (circular structures known to many as yurts) in the Mongolian steppe. Along the way, he explores the agroforestry and pastoral systems that have evolved alongside these native livestock breeds and traditional foods, showing how closely they are intertwined with the landscapes that sustain them. He describes this as ‘deep terroir…a direct aromatic correlation exists between a cheese and the place it is made’.  

Many of the cheeses Wamedahl explores are made without a starter culture – the cheeses are shaped by four factors (he calls them the ‘layers of terroir’): the livestock (breed, herd size and health); the location,which influences their feed, its mineral content, and the water and air they breathe; and a community of beneficial microbes living on the cheese.  This is, then, all brought together by human cultural practices. ‘To this day, the recipe lives on in a cultural body, the amassed multi–generational experiential knowledge passed down by doing the work and honing the senses to the standards set by tradition. It is this knowledge – combined with the tools, materials, and techniques that forms the layer of cultural terroir. The people are the recipe.’ 

Wamedahl also reflects on his own journey from conventional cheesemaking towards a much deeper appreciation of traditional methods, while questioning how packaged starters and standardised processes have shaped the cheeses we produce and eat today. It was fascinating to learn that, despite these pressures, pockets of truly natural cheesemaking continue to survive. The book has certainly encouraged me to seek out smaller producers, both at home and when travelling. 

The book can be a bit technical at times, but I appreciated the details and there’s a good glossary for your questions. The chapters are easily dipped into independently, so whether you’re curious about Sicilian Pecorino one day or yak’s milk cheese the next, this is a perfect summer read for anyone interested in food, farming and the ways that a place and its people shape what we eat.

 

First Helpings: A history of children and food  

Authors: Deborah Albon and Amy Palmer; Publisher: Reaktion Books 

Reviewed by Amy Warner 

First Helpings is a rich and revealing history of a subject hiding in plain sight: how British children have been fed, taught to eat, put to work, and sometimes left to go hungry, from the medieval period to today. Albon and Palmer, both former lecturers in early childhood studies, bring genuine scholarly rigour to the project, but never at the expense of storytelling. The book opens with the testimony of a Victorian child street-seller, and that commitment to surfacing children’s own voices, so often missing from the historical record, runs through the book. 

The range of material is what makes the book sing. Court records of vagrant children sleeping under London market stalls sit alongside Roman physicians feeding advice, wartime rationing schemes, GCSE cookery statistics, and even a properly entertaining detour through breastfeeding anxiety in Game of Thrones. Contentious topics such as breast versus bottle, discipline at the table, and whether the state should feed the child, are addressed with real even-handedness, and gendered labour is a persistent, well-drawn thread in who learns to cook and why. 

The final chapter on hunger, bringing centuries of evidence right up to today’s UK food poverty statistics, gives the whole book its urgency. Neither author is a parent, and they say so plainly — this isn’t a parenting manual, but something more useful: a clear-eyed history of just how contested “the right way” to feed a child has always been.

 

How to Fall in Love with the Future: A time traveller’s guide to changing the world

Author: Rob Hopkins; Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing UK

Reviewed by Alice Frost

It seems increasingly difficult to find a solid non-fiction read about the climate, nature and environmentalism, that isn’t also incredibly unsettling and anxiety-inducing, so let me introduce you to How to Fall in Love with the Future: A time traveller’s guide to changing the world…

How to Fall in Love with the Future does touch on the devastating consequences that our reliance on fossil fuels, intensive agriculture and mass consumerism has caused, as well as the disproportionate damage capitalism, and most notably, the world’s richest have inflicted on the planet, but this is balanced out by offering a genuinely hopeful light at the end of the tunnel. That light? A time machine.

Hopkins is not talking about literal time travel of course – though how cool would that be – he’s talking instead about the power of our imagination and its untapped potential, envisioning a future where we’ve collectively put words into action and begun to make progress so that we can confidently look to the future and smile – rather than grimace.

How to Fall in Love with the Future shares a radical yet entirely credible lens on the future, reminding us of our agency to create a better future for ourselves and the next generation – totally opposite from the one we’re constantly being told is inevitable and that it’s too late to change the outcome now. It’s true: the future hasn’t been written yet, but we need change and we need it urgently.

However, Hopkins doesn’t inspire hope through purely positive sentiments and cautious optimism – he shares real world examples where transformative initiatives across the world are already creating real change: from a successful local food system in southeast France, where 80% of the food served in schools comes from a local market garden (and is 100% organic!), to the (almost) entirely car-free Vauban district in Germany, where for every 1,000 residents, there are only 172 cars.

By imagining time travel is possible, Hopkins dares us to imagine what we’d want 2030 to look like. Is it greener, cleaner, more colourful? What can you smell? Fewer fumes, home-cooked meals wafting from open kitchen windows, pollinating flowers of the city’s sprawling urban gardens? What can you hear? Bird song, children playing outside, no impatient beeping of car horns? Whatever it is you imagine, Hopkins urges us to question why this can’t be our reality. Think about the small adjustments we can all make to create change, and be cautiously optimistic and hopeful in the eye of very uncertain times.

If you’re looking for a read this summer that will lift your spirits amongst the intense despair and gloom, How to Fall in Love with the Future will do exactly that – this book will dare you to imagine ‘what if?’ and reignite your activism. I’m looking forward to Hopkins’ follow-up: Falling in Love with the Present in 2030…!

And don’t miss these other reads…

The Future of Food Policy in the UK: Recipe for Change

Author: Honor May Eldridge

“This book makes a compelling case for the urgent need to develop a new approach to food and farming—one that integrates the principles of food security and sovereignty. In the face of escalating challenges such as climate change and increasing political instability worldwide, it is essential to rethink food production and future-proof it by prioritising resilience.”

The Last Cows: On Ranching, Wonder, and a Woman’s Heart

Author: Kathryn Wilder

“Told from the unique perspective of a woman, mother, environmentalist, cowboy, and rancher, this work of literary nonfiction conveys the joys, challenges, heartbreaks, and qualms of contemporary ranching in the American West.”

Gather: Black Food, Nourishment and the Art of Togetherness

Author: Ashanté M. Reese

“How can we create a world where everyone has enough? We can start by focusing less on lack and more on abundance. In Gather, anthropologist Ashanté M. Reese argues for a new vision of food justice that centres the resilience of Black communities and argues that community nourishment deserves as much consideration as individual health.”

After more food and farming inspiration? Read our 2026 film and TV reviews here.

 

 

The SFT team have picked out some of their personal recommendations for the year ahead – find out what films and TV series need to be on your radar and where you can find them.

Members of the SFT team share some of their top food and farming reads for 2025.

 

The Accidental Seed Heroes: Growing a Delicious Food Future for All of Us

Author: Adam Alexander; Publisher: Chelsea Green

Reviewed by Amy Warner

Adam Alexander’s The Accidental Seed Heroes is a powerful and timely exploration of the quiet revolution reshaping the future of our food. He embarks on a global journey to uncover the individuals and communities who are saving, breeding and innovating seeds outside the grip of industrial agriculture.

At the heart of the book lies a simple but radical premise: that every grower, from backyard gardener to traditional farmer, has the potential to be a “seed hero”. Through vivid storytelling and immersive reportage, Alexander introduces us to an inspiring cast of twenty-first-century plant breeders from places as varied as southern Albania, Ethiopia’s Great Rift Valley, rural India, and his own garden in Wales. These are individuals who understand that biodiversity, flavour and adaptability are not luxuries but necessities in the face of a climate crisis and corporate control of seed stock. He also delves into the fascinating genetic lineage of different cultivars, how they developed in popularity and became so dominant in global production for better or, in some cases, for worse.

Alexander’s style is equal parts investigative and affectionate. He blends scientific rigor with enthusiasm as he explains plant breeding techniques both ancient and modern, from phenotype selection to genome editing and marker-assisted selection.

What makes The Accidental Seed Heroes especially engaging is its political urgency. Alexander pulls no punches in exposing the dangers of seed patenting, corporate monopolies and the commodification of food. He critiques a global system that marginalises traditional knowledge and breeds genetic homogeneity at the expense of resilience. But he does so with a hopeful spirit, arguing that alternative systems – rooted in open-source breeding, farmer-led innovation and public good – are not only possible but already thriving in small pockets around the globe.

Whether you’re a seasoned grower, a food systems advocate or simply a curious reader concerned about the future of what we eat, The Accidental Seed Heroes will inspire, educate and move you. It’s not just a book about seeds – it’s a manifesto for food sovereignty, biodiversity and ecological justice.

 

From the Ground Up: The Women Revolutionising Regenerative Agriculture

Author: Stephanie Anderson; Publisher: The New Press

Reviewed by Alice Frost

Stephanie Anderson’s From the Ground Up explores the roles of 13 different women across the US – from California to North Carolina – unknown to one another but connected by their commitment to transforming America’s food and farming systems for the better.

From the Ground Up is divided into eight chapters, each of which sees Anderson visit a woman or group of women who have a role to play in the regenerative agriculture transition. In South Dakota, Kelsey Scott, a fourth-generation rancher and descendent of the Lakota Nation, practices regenerative rotational grazing in an effort to transform the drought-ridden prairie lands. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Bu Nygrens, Mary Jane Evans and Karen Salinger are heading up Veritable Vegetable, a regional food hub which supplies consumers with a diverse produce list of various fruits and vegetables, courtesy of a diverse growers’ network. We also meet the women who are working as outreach workers to support farmers who are beginning to transition to more regenerative methods, and the women who are sourcing investment to finance this transition, along with those who are pedalling the policy to take it to scale.

It’s 2022 when Anderson meets the women of From the Ground Up – at the same time, the Supreme Court draft decision to overturn Roe v. Wade is leaked, a shocking moment in American history. It’s a stark – if not rather unpleasant – reminder that makes this book feel all the more urgent and necessary reading, to hear from the women who refuse to be held down and turned away. Anderson explains how the ruling motivated her that much more to write the book: “The part of me feeling low needs to witness this kind of strength right now … [the need] to hear from women who thrived in harsher circumstances than my generation faces.”

Each of the women in this book are rejecting the idea of what the modern American farmer, food distributor, executive or policymaker should look like. Not only are they women attempting to break the mould, but they’re also women of colour, they’re queer women, women from marginalised communities who aren’t often given a seat at the table. Their presence in a traditionally male-dominated field will embolden others to participate and make sure their voice is heard, and as Bu Nygrens puts it “It’s not enough to criticise the paradigm. You have to be the thing that you want to replace the paradigm with.”

 

Milk into Cheese: The Foundations of Natural Cheesemaking Using Traditional Concepts, Tools, and Techniques

Author: David Asher; Publisher: Chelsea Green / Rizzoli

Reviewed by Rachel Kehoe

Milk into Cheese is more than a cheesemaking manual – it’s a meditation on our relationship with milk, tradition and time. With the authority of someone who has lived the process, David Asher guides readers through the rhythms of nature, dairy and fermentation.

Structured in three parts, the book blends history, culture, microbiology, chemistry and culinary technique. It invites us to question the assumptions of the modern dairy industry – its reliance on pasteurisation, refrigeration and industrial production – and instead rediscover the slower, more intentional craft of traditional cheesemaking. From sourcing milk to aging wheels, every step is explored in detail, with practical advice and troubleshooting throughout.

Asher opens boldly: “Here I am in France, teaching the French how to make cheese.” As the book unfolds, his deep knowledge and lived experience shines through, and you begin to see why. His ethos is clear – a return to a more grounded, artisanal way of working with milk. He paints vivid scenes of a time when cheese was made twice daily, not for novelty but for necessity, and milk was treated as the precious, living food it is.

Though centred on cheese, the final section branches out into recipes for other cultured staples – cultured butter, sourdough bread, wine, cider and the caramelised Slavic yogurt ‘ryazhenka’. These additions make the book both an inspiring read and a practical kitchen companion.

Whether or not you plan to age your own Comté, Milk into Cheese will likely change the way you see dairy – and may just have you dusting off that yogurt pot.

 

Nuggets of Gold: Further Processed Chicken and the Making of the American Diet

Author: Patrick Dixon; Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Reviewed by Imogen Crossland

Nuggets of Gold tells the story of one of America’s most loved – and most controversial – foods: the chicken nugget. Without casting heavy judgment, Patrick Dixon examines the political, social and economic forces that helped processed chicken become a staple of the American diet.

In the 1930s, US farmers rarely kept more than 200 chickens, often as a side venture to make use of the farm’s by-products. But after the Great Depression, as farmers sought new, more prosperous income streams, feed mills and agribusinesses seized the opportunity to expand production. A World War II campaign urged Americans to “Eat more poultry and conserve beef and pork for the armed forces,” propelling chicken to become a mainstream meat. Within a few decades, millions of chickens were being processed annually, accompanied by a host of ecological, social and animal welfare consequences.

Dixon sheds particular light on the inner workings of poultry processing plants – an industry largely hidden from public view. While the demographics of poultry workers have shifted over time, working conditions have, shockingly, changed very little – it remains a low-paid job with a heavy physical and emotional toll. Dixon also points out that animal welfare concerns rarely extend beyond the farm gate and into the “hidden realm of the abattoir”. It’s a stark reminder that these are issues which should be central to conversations about the future of livestock production.

The nugget made its official debut (as the McNugget) in 1983. Positioned as a lighter, healthier alternative to the beef burger, its popularity soared in an era of cost-cutting and weight-watching. One question that springs to mind is whether the rise of the nugget (and its further processed cousins) can be attributed solely to consumer demand for such products, or whether corporate sales strategies and aggressive marketing played a greater role. As one former Taco Bell CEO put it: “We’re really not in the business of making food. We’re in the business of feeding people.”

What Dixon leaves to the imagination is where we go from here: will industrial chicken nuggets persist for another 50 years? Will they be replaced by lab-grown alternatives? And what about the health and wellbeing of the chickens, the workers and the people who eat them?

 

The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos

Author: Mark J. Easter; Publisher: Patagonia

Reviewed by Alicia Miller

The Blue Plate by Mark J. Easter is part odyssey, part exploration and part a search for answers. Its premise is a simple one – Easter asks “Can we transform agriculture from a system that literally consumes the planet to one that nurtures and respects this home that is all we will ever know? Can we cultivate from the Earth meals that nourish us, a Blue Plate of sorts, rather than the Earth being the meal itself?”

Easter is an ecologist who comes to the table wanting to find answers to this simple set of questions. He also likes his food and wants to understand better how we can create a more sustainable food system as we move towards the impending climate chaos we are all beginning to witness. Agriculture is at the heart of his quest, and he seeks to banish the industrialised food system that is wreaking havoc across the globe.

For Easter, it is a journey through past practices that have been renewed and sometimes reinvented. “Growing cover crops to feed the soil, preventing erosion, feeding livestock on pastures integrated with food crops, composting food waste and livestock manure to cycle nutrients back onto fields and pastures, and purchasing from one’s local ‘foodshed’ all were common-sense aspects of ag­riculture in times past,” comments Easter. These practices are focused on ‘drawdown’, locking up our emissions in our soils, leaving them undisturbed and on top, utilising cover crops, composting and the wonders of grazing livestock. There is much promise in the regenerative practices that more and more farmers are adopting, especially in the US, and change could make all the difference.

How do we end the burning of fossil fuels? We are a long way off still from realising this, but reworking our food system could offer a meaningful way forward towards a better world. The book ends with some simple suggestions: keep carbon in the soil and minimise tillage; bring our food closer to home; take care of our rivers and seas and don’t fly fish and other food around the world; finally, compost as much as you can.

 

Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet

Author: Stuart Gillespie; Publisher: Canongate

Reviewed by Mali Gravell

Food Fight is the latest contribution from global nutrition expert Stuart Gillespie. Gillespie’s global experience, rooted in decades of work on nutrition shines through this powerful read. It provides an eloquent overview of the modern, global food system and takes the reader through the transition of the food system from its colonial roots through to the current era of corporate dominance.

The first parts of the book – titled ‘Cascade’ and ‘Regime’ – chronicle the journey of the food system to one which is dominated by profit maximisation leading to widespread malnutrition, obesity and environmental degradation. It reiterates that the current food system is not broken; it is functioning as it has been designed to – enabling a few to make large profits. It is not focused on nurturing people or planet.  The book takes the reader through an assessment of where and why the system is failing, providing a deep diagnosis of the structural issues, laced with on-the-ground examples from individuals and organisations across the globe.

Food Fight provides a unique blend of realism and hope – the urgency of the situation is made clear but the opportunity for hope leaves you feeling slightly daunted. Real world solutions that are already in action are highlighted alongside personal stories of successful change. Although published amidst a proliferation of food system narratives in recent years, this felt like another piece of the puzzle rather than a re-writing of the same story.

For anyone interested in health, nutrition, climate, sustainability and social justice, this book provides a thorough overview of where our food system is now and of the deep and systemic changes required to shift our food system back into balance

 

Carbon: The Book of Life

Author: Paul Hawken; Publisher: Viking Press USA

Reviewed by Alicia Miller

Paul Hawken’s book Carbon: The Book of Life is a call to all of us to sit up and pay attention to what is happening to our planet and all that lives on it. We are in the midst of a world that is at risk in every way imaginable and most of us are looking the other way and pretending not to notice. In the opening paragraph, Hawken reminds us that “Carbon’s increase in the atmosphere moves in tandem with the loss of the living world.” And that loss, if it is left untended will be our demise. It’s a stark warning.

Carbon, says Hawken, is “a window into the entirety of life”, and through the book, he follows the strands of carbon. He explores the early investigations into climate change as it arose in the 19^th century, through the prescient studies of scientists who began to think the climate was warming. “Humankind,” Hawken writes, “created a new geological era by burning ten billion years of fossilised carbon in a few centuries.” Here in the 21^st century, we are faced with the consequences, but the problem is that “Most of humanity doesn’t talk about climate change because we don’t know what to say.”

Carbon, Hawken tells us, is “the keystone element of sentience”. But biology is more complicated than we think, and Carbon illustrates some of the complications of ‘life’, more broadly. For starters, biologists have ceased to define what it is, leaving its finality still waiting at the door. There are infinitesimal beings like the tardigrade and rotifers that can survive in ways unimaginable to other lifeforms – reanimating themselves with a bit of water after decades or even millennia. These are wonders to behold!

Hawken tells both extraordinary and terrifying stories – his description of the ongoing decline of insects that will lead to the end of the planet if our attitude towards bugs doesn’t change, is just one of them. Hawken begs for a more caring world that encompasses all of life, not just human life, and begs us to see sentience not only in ourselves.

On Gold Hill: A Personal History of Wheat, Farming, and Family, from Punjab to California

Author: Jaclyn Moyer; Publisher: Penguin Random House

Reviewed by Isabel Eaton

Writer and organic grower, Jaclyn Moyer grew up in California, distanced both geographically and culturally from her family’s roots in the Punjab region of India. Unable to speak the language of her grandparents and with few insights into the shape of their lives prior to their move to the US in the 1970s, she arrives in her mid-twenties increasingly troubled by this disconnection from her ancestry.

However, when she and her partner Ryan take on the tenure of an organic small holding in Gold Hill, California in 2012, the land provides an unexpected opportunity to explore her family’s past. Through the growing of Sonora wheat, a landrace grain once commonly produced in California and whose origins can be traced back to Punjab, Moyer begins to form an ever-closer connection with her heritage, culminating in a visit to the village where her grandmother grew up.

Combining an honest and personal account of the challenges of running an organic farm with insights into the turbulent history of her family, and an exploration of the impacts of the Green Revolution, US international food policy and the organic movement on food systems in India, the US and beyond, on the surface On Gold Hill may appear to be covering rather a lot of ground. But Moyer cleverly weaves all these elements together into a cohesive debut book, which is touching, eye opening and well worth a read.

 

 

Regenerating Earth: Farmers Working with Nature to Feed Our Future

Author: Kelsey Timmerman; Publisher: Patagonia

Reviewed by Victoria Halliday

Regenerating Earth takes us on a global journey to visit some of the world’s most inspiring farms and rural communities. Coming from a long lineage of farmers and prompted by his own move to a smallholding in Indiana, author Kelsey Timmerman sought to deepen his understanding of how farming can rebuild our health, our sense of belonging and the planet’s ecosystems.

Timmerman’s home is surrounded by industrial agriculture – seemingly endless stretches of single crops that depend on vast amounts of agrichemicals, water and oil. It is a form of farming that is squeezing out many smaller and medium sized producers, while also damaging the environment and feeding the centralised, ultra-processed food system that is undermining our health. Timmerman emphasises that it isn’t farmers who should be blamed for this – they include his friends and family, many of whom are at the frontline when it comes to bearing the ill-effects.

Resolving not to succumb to despondency, Timmerman sets off on a journey that sees him visit regenerative farms in the US, agroforestry operations in Brazil and the cattle herding communities of Kenya. He seeks to uncover the universal principles that underpin a regenerative approach to farming, while sharing the very human stories of the people behind these places – people who often fiercely battle corporate interests in order to protect their way of life and enjoy a more connected existence.

While ‘regenerative’ has become a popular buzzword of late, Timmerman reminds us, “Regenerative agriculture isn’t an exciting new thing. It’s an exciting old thing. As it’s been practiced by Indigenous people for thousands of years, it’s not centered on extraction but on relationships with the natural world; it is not just about farming, but our relationships with science and technology, each other, and ourselves.” Through a mix of first-hand conversations, thoughtful reflections and photography, Regenerating Earth combines the practical and the philosophical to show how we can embrace a more joyful way of living, farming and eating – not just in the future, but in the here-and-now.

Setting a Place for Us: Recipes and Stories of Displacement, Resilience, and Community from Eight Countries Impacted by War

Hawa Hassan

“An enthralling, intimate collection of essays and over 75 recipes exploring the history of eight countries to understand the impact of geopolitical conflict and its outcomes on cuisine and food system, from Somali refugee and James Beard Award-winning author of In Bibi’s Kitchen.”

Banana Capital: Stories, Science, and Poison at the Equator

Ben Brisbois

“An urgent call to action, unveiling the power dynamics of life in the banana industry. Ultimately, the book provides a roadmap toward social justice and sustainability in the uncertain future of banana production.”

Our food & farming reviews of 2025 are here – what’s been cropping up this past year and worth watching?

 

The Grab

Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite

Where to watch: Available to rent or buy via select streaming services. For anyone interested in hosting a screening of The Grab, please contact ROCO films to find out more, at contactus@rocofilms.com.

The Grab is a must-see film for anyone interested in the shape of things to come as we face climate change and all that it will bring. The future does not look friendly and across the globe a land grab is slowly and quietly mapping terrain that will benefit the rich and powerful and devastate the poor. “The priority is not the people,” says one commentator and this is played out around the world.

The Center for Investigative Reporting has been tracking what’s been happening over the last decade or more – a growing contingent of companies and countries that are buying up land in places where there are ample and available resources, especially water.

China, in particular, is concerned with the future of their food and water having lived through the Great Chinese Famine – three devastating years between 1959 and 1961. The impact of the famine led to an ongoing concern for the food security of China that continues to this day. In response to these concerns, the Chinese government is exploiting Africa’s land and water, like many other countries with depleted or limited resources.

What results from these land grabs is the loss of land, water and valuable resources taken from small communities and countries around the world that have been pushed aside and pillaged by bigger corporate and governmental interests, slowly creating a world of have and have nots –  an imbalance that may generate future global wars. “It’s inequity. It’s seeding future conflict. It’s destabilising the world,” says lead reporter Nathan Halverson. The situation as portrayed in The Grab urges us to be wary of what lies ahead.

 

One Last Farm

Directed by Nikki Dodd

Where to watch: Details of upcoming screenings will be available here. Alternatively, if you’d like to host a screening, you can contact Nikki to find out more.

One Last Farm is the story of Yew Tree Farm – the last working farm in Bristol, England. Over the past half century or more, farming has disappeared from the city. Catherine Withers has been fighting hard for 22 years now to keep the farm going, facing an array of threats to its existence during that time. The farm is small with a remarkably diverse array of landscapes – woodland, ancient meadows, a stream that runs through the farm drawing a broad range of creatures and birds. The farm is now a Site of Nature Conservation Interest and a testament to the value of farming with nature.

Withers does not own all of the land on the farm, and this has left her vulnerable. She’s already lost 13 acres to a private landowner and now the city of Bristol wants to take back 20 acres that have been leased to Yew Tree Farm since the 1960s. The potential impact on the farm’s wildlife could be devastating and concern for this is ongoing.

Catherine is in for the long fight and she’s got a growing band of supporters who share her concerns. There isn’t an end yet to her travails, but the film is a reminder of how easily things can be lost and that they are worth fighting for.

Sadly, while Catherine Withers has fought fiercely for years to keep Yew Tree Farm as it has been, she has agreed to reaching a settlement with other family members that means she will ultimately leave her residence on the farm.

The number of farms in urban fringes has decreased considerably over the last decade and it is unclear what will ultimately happen to Yew Tree Farm. The demands of growing cities are increasingly impinging on farmland. That Yew Tree Farm has survived as long as it has, is, in many ways, a testament of Catherine’s commitment to the land and its creatures.

 

Heal the Land

Directed by Tom Francome and Hayley Smith

Where to watch: Heal the Land will be screening at TCN, Newark Works in Bath on Thursday 8^th May – click here for more information.

Within the first few minutes of Heal the Land, we’re told that England is one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth. England ranks in the bottom 3% of 240 countries and territories – a statistic that reveals the tragic plight of much of the country’s wildlife. But Heal the Land isn’t a story about despair and loss, rather, it’s one about optimism, determination and reasons to feel hopeful for the future of nature in England.

The film tells the story of Heal Rewilding’s journey to restore a 460-acre site in the Somerset countryside. Formerly a hunting forest in the 14^th century, the land is now a grasslands site, home to trees, hedges, rivers and an array of wildlife.

Dan, a young ranger at Heal Rewilding sets up camera traps along one of the rivers on the land in hopes there may be beavers, and reviewing the footage, finds indeed that not just one but two beavers are working away on a den. He shares the footage he’s captured with Ruby who oversees Heal Rewilding’s communications and social media work. Like Dan, when she sees the beaver, she’s ecstatic and the passion and excitement at seeing even a glimpse of the wildlife onsite is not only infectious but reassuring – there is a next generation enthusiastic, engaged and inspired about restoring nature.

Heal the Land serves as an exciting and accessible entryway for anyone hoping to find out more about rewilding and the small things we can all do to help support and restore nature. It evidences the potential of what can be realised, given care and commitment. With the US President’s attack on climate policy, the rollback of SFI payments in England and the steep decline in global wildlife, it can be difficult to stay hopeful, but what Heal Rewilding is doing to restore and revive nature on its Somerset land makes a difference.

Now what we need, is to see this sort of hope and enthusiasm applied to nature-friendly farming practices to ensure that nature is respected and supported as a vital, integral and valuable part of what farmers do.

 

Wilding

Directed by David Allen

Where to watch: Available to stream on BFI Player.

The story of the Knepp estate, is a story of renewal and regeneration and one that is deeply inspiring. Coming from a background of industrial farming, Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell tried for years to make the family farm viable, but it wasn’t until they completely turned away from how they were farming, that things began to change on the estate. Starting with the estate’s ancient Oak trees, they began to recognise how their industrial farming practices were damaging the land, damaging the wildlife and much more.

Early on in the film, Charlie comments, “What we were seeing in the early stages was absolutely no sign of anything – and that was a real ‘wow’. What had we been doing before? What were we thinking…that feeling of guilt…we have presided over a period of real destruction and we need to think again…” The realisation was transformative as Charlie and Isabella began a kind of rewilding of the land in a way that embraced both farming and nature, allowing both to thrive.

It takes some extraordinary bravery (not to mention quite a bit of cash) to realise the transformation of Knepp into such an extraordinary site. But there are real lessons to be learned from the project – the most important is that farming and nature can co-exist in ways that are beneficial to both, if the land is cared for organically and holistically. Charlie and Isabella sought to step outside of the proverbial box, in order to realise something far more meaningful – that we share this world with myriad other creatures without whom, we would instigate our own demise.

 

Hope in the Water

Directed by Brian Peter Falk

Where to watch: Hope in the Water is currently unavailable to stream in the UK – for the latest updates, click here.

This PBS series which started running in 2024, tracks the potentiality of the sea to feed us more sustainably. It’s a big ask in this day and age, when seabeds are regularly dredged and most fish are in significant decline. It takes looking well outside of the box to see what might be possible – and this is exactly what Hope in Water is about. Can our oceans and waters offer us a greater range of foods, without us inflicting greater damage upon them? And what alternative foods can sustainable aquaculture offer?

The series starts with shrimp – one of the most popular seafoods, eaten widely across the globe – and tracks a broad range of issues affecting fishing and fisheries and how to move to more sustainable practices. In the US, the Gulf of Mexico has long been laced with hatcheries along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida, but the devastating impact of run-off from the Mississippi delta has made this increasingly difficult. However, there are alternatives for shrimp production, to be found, remarkably, in Minnesota. Farmer Paul Danhof started producing salt water shrimp when his parents shut down their dairy business. It’s an unconventional transition, but one that has become successful.

The fishermen and fisherwomen in the series are looking for ways to preserve the bounty of what the sea offers without destroying it. And this is surprisingly easy to do in many cases – take the purple ‘zombie’ sea urchins that overrun the shallow seabed off the California coast to their detriment. These completely edible urchins have not the kudos of the larger red urchins, but they are phenomenally plentiful and harvesting them keeps the seabed in balance.

It’s imperative that if we want to save our fish stocks and seafood, we eat more diversely – kelp, for example, is a hugely nutritious food and it can be delicious, and dog fish are plentiful and tasty. But key here is that we must keep sustainability at front the of our minds if we are to avoid inflicting yet more damage upon the world’s oceans in our search for food.

 

Featured image courtesy of Rob Carmier.

The following extract is from Simon Fairlie’s new book Going to Seed: A Counterculture Memoir (Chelsea Green Publishing, February 2022) and is reprinted with permission from the publisher.

Unlike a nuclear family, a community provides an economic foundation for a viable farming operation at a scale appropriate to its size. Monkton Wyld with its quota of visitors and volunteers is well-suited to a small herd of three cows, and indeed has supported just such a herd since 1982, apart from the two years prior to my arrival. In fact, a functioning micro dairy goes back to 1941 when the school began. It may well be the oldest dairy enterprise of its size in Britain.

When I arrived most of the infrastructure for providing this was still in place: a milking parlour with stalls for six cows, cow sheds and a small dairy. Not so long ago there were thousands of such steadings around the country, supporting up to a dozen cows. Every stately home possessed one and so did countless humble smallholdings; the cash flow of family farms was guaranteed by regular payments from the Milk Marketing Board for a few churns left out for collection every morning. But by 2010, virtually all had either been left to go derelict, or else been converted into holiday cottages.

Monkton Wyld’s dairy farm was on the way to a similar fate. There were all the symptoms of a hippie commune in decline. The milking parlour and cowsheds were full of plastic guttering, unused beehives, broken tools, old timber and bags of rubbish. One room was stuffed with detritus from courses in which children were taught to manufacture hideous contraptions out of yoghurt pots, toilet rolls, plastic bags and all the other effluvia of capitalist culture. A tile was missing from the roof above the beehives: instead of replacing the tile – a ten minute job – someone had placed corrugated iron inside to divert the dripping water away from the beehives onto a tie beam, which as a result had rotted away.

The state of the land was similar. The pasture, which hadn’t been grazed or mown for two years, was thick with yellowing tussocks, while briar and bracken patches were invading from all sides. A half-acre orchard was completely engulfed in six-foot-high brambles and bracken. The fencing was in total disrepair. Even today, if you dig into the earth through decades of topsoil, you are likely to uncover hippie archaeology – rotting carpets, plastic sheeting or woven ‘tarpaulins’ that disintegrate into thousands of polypropylene strands – indicating that the ground had once been ‘mulched’ or was the site of an old sweat lodge.

All of this decay could be remedied. It was not a priority for the community, which had more pressing matters to address on the main house. But the rent I was paying Monkton Wyld for accommodation for the scythe business covered the cost of installing fencing and carrying out repairs. My old friend Gill Barron, now a well-known painter, came to visit, decided to stay, and helped me get set up. Eleven years later, I’m glad to say, she is still here. Within a few months we had bought one Jersey cow and borrowed another. Within a few years we had rented a further three acres and milked three Jerseys.

Now, a decade later, the dairy is still functioning, usually with three cows, though we went down to two during the pandemic. Our oldest, Folly, has been with us ten years and is still in top form. After my half-cocked attempts at agriculture in previous years, it is good to have tumbled on something that works.

The reason it works is because the cows, the land and the community are in near-perfect symbiosis. The cows benefit because we provide them with the winter feed they cannot harvest for themselves, in the form of hay, with medical care, and with a more painless death than nature can offer. In return they each give us about four thousand litres of rich creamy milk a year, containing enough fat, protein and calories to feed four people indefinitely. They produce this by grazing Britain’s most abundant, easily grown and biodiverse crop, grass, keeping bracken and brambles at bay, and letting the sunlight in to allow meadow plants to flourish, along with butterflies and other insects. Moreover about 85 per cent of the nutrients that a cow ingests come out the rear end. She harvests biomass, chips and shreds it, bioactivates and digests it, transports it, and extrudes it as the manure that is vital for our acre of vegetable garden, all without using a gram of fossil fuel. Meanwhile the whey from our cheese, along with vegetable and food waste, goes to feed our pigs.

Our cows are the backbone of a traditional mixed farming system that enables us to provide thirty people a day with healthy home-produced food, and to do so with zero packaging and zero food miles. Perhaps, given today’s nucleated social structure, this cannot be widely replicated, but it can be scaled up. There is no reason why schools, hospitals and prisons couldn’t run their own dairy farm providing, in the case of school children, the free milk that Thatcher took away – a nourishing and educational alternative to sugary carbonated beverages. That was precisely what Monkton Wyld did when it was a school feeding seventy pupils and staff from the milk of six cows.

And what if villages reclaimed some ownership of their land, and members of the community supported the agriculture that flourished around them? That’s what real Community Supported Agriculture should look like – not just green hippie types driving miles to pick up their ethically sound vegetables, but every rural settlement with its farm shop and its milk dispensing machine selling all the fresh dairy produce, meat, bread, fruit and vegetables that its farmers can sensibly produce. This must surely be the direction rural people should be taking if we are to eliminate fossil fuels and plastic packaging, while safeguarding the complex relationship we have forged with the natural world through traditional agriculture. The alternative looks increasingly likely to be a diet of hydroponic and lab-grown junk food, courtesy of a hydrogen-powered urban bio-technocracy.

A revival of micro-dairies would also bridge the gulf between the majority of citizens, especially children, and the farm animals and plants that provide their nourishment; this rupture is a direct result of the centralisation of livestock production. Visitors to Monkton Wyld come to gawp at us at milking time and bring their children to view the spectacle as if it was an educational rite of passage, when once it was as banal an activity as changing a baby’s nappy. A generation of urban youth is subjected to propaganda about what goes on in intensive dairy farms, some of it accurate but most of it exaggerated, and comes away with an erroneous interpretation of the bond between cows and humans. Yes, that relationship is open to abuse – as is the bond between married couples, or parent and child – but that doesn’t prevent it being basically a benign one.

Like all farm animals, over the course of several thousand years, cows have adapted to domestication. Literally, that means acceptance into the household (though in the case of cows, not the sitting room). For the most part, cows and oxen are pretty chilled creatures, more so than horses, pigs, sheep, chickens or dogs, all of which are prone at times to over-excitement or panic. Whether grazing, giving suck or chewing the cud, their presence soothes the human spirit. The act of ruminating has become a metaphor for composed contemplation. Even vegans like domesticated cows, and those that visit our farm are hard put to find anything to object to.

Escape the Saturday evening endless-scroll and settle down with one of the latest films from the world of food and farming.

The Ants and the Grasshopper

Director: Raj Patel; contact Kartemquin Films for viewing

Raj Patel’s latest film is an exploration of perspective – it’s all a matter of how you are looking at things. The champion of the movie is a young farmer, Anita Chitaya, in Malawi. Women are traditionally responsible for food production in Malawian culture – the men are largely left to hang about. Anita is up at dawn drawing water for the day; she is acutely aware of climate change. Rain in the region is coming far less frequently and growing the food needed is getting harder. She is an activist and community leader, looking for better ways of working, so that it’s easier to survive. But she knows that in other places in the world, in America to be precise, there are people not attending to what is happening on the earth.

Driven by a deeply felt concern for this, she wants to speak about climate change to farmers in the US. Anita travels across America visiting an array of different farms both urban and rural, asking about each farmers thoughts on climate change and getting a diversity of responses. There is clearly a lack of consensus about whether climate change is happening. What haunts the film is the quiet frustration of wanting to be heard. It is, inevitably, a struggle and coming from a place so small, she is trying to change beliefs in a place so large. Anita comments at the end, that ‘there are so many ants, but only a few are lifting the grasshopper’.

Under the Soil

Director: Archie Guinchard; Amazon Prime

Mental health among farmers and farm workers in the UK is a significant issue – between 2019 – 2020, 133 farmers and agricultural workers committed suicide and a 2021 survey found that 88% of farmers under the age of 40 said they had poor mental health. Farming is a hard, difficult profession, subject to struggle and failure, and these figures testify to its toll. Under the Soil, in a series of interviews, takes a close look at the issues that farmers and farm workers struggle with. Through three interviews, it picks apart the dangerous decline in mental health that can lead to depression and potentially suicide.

Matt, a young farmer building his own herd of sheep, is faced with the impact of a sudden devastating snow storm that kills many of his sheep. Forced to make difficult decisions over what animals to save in this crisis, he descends into depression in the aftermath, now facing significant financial loss. A second late spring storm brings further loss.

Risk is an ever-present pressure in farming, and weather a constant threat – both capricious and dangerous. Making the bottom line work is something many farmers struggle with throughout their farming life. But the money and the weather are just one aspect of farming that is hard; it can also be a lonely, exhausting existence that pushes people to their limits, and support is much needed. The final interview of the film is with Emma; she lost her husband, an agricultural worker, to suicide and as a way of leaving a meaningful legacy for her husband, she founded the DPJ Foundation to support the mental health of farmers and agricultural workers. The Foundation’s programme is called ‘share the load’.

Follow the Food: Series 1, 2 & 3

BBC

This BBC series takes a comprehensive look, across three seasons, at our food system and the issues at stake – series 3 is just kicking off. The world is producing more food than ever before, but at great cost to the environment, biodiversity loss and climate change. One in three people do not have enough to eat, despite the fact that there is a vast amount of food waste across the world. Food security is a continuing issue in many countries and it’s not just about having enough food, it’s also about having the right kind of food to nourish a person. And ironically, the people producing our food, are the least able to afford it.

With James Wong as the presenter, the critical problems that we face in food production are unpicked in detail, with a focus on food affordability, availability, resilience, quality and safety. Series 1, which started in autumn 2020 looked at the impact of COVID-19 on food supplies and followed on with problems of hunger, soil degradation, food waste and how tech might change the way we farm; series 2 takes on the role of food production in climate change and topics like ‘Why we need to expand our diet’ and the often overlooked issue of where the next generation of farmers are coming from.

The first episode of series 3 asks a big question, ‘What would it take to produce cheap, healthy food for everyone on the planet without harming the environment?’, perhaps both the easiest and the most complex question to answer in a world teetering on potential collapse. Food production is at the heart of our global problems, so watch this and get a grip on what we face!

Fat Fiction

Director: Jennifer Isenhart; YouTube

The dietary guidelines of eating less fat have been at the root of US food policy for decades, but more recently thinking about the role of fat in diets is changing significantly.

From the 1950s onwards, American diets began to change, largely as the result of one highly influential figure: Ancel Keys, a physiologist who was researching cardiovascular disease which was on the rise. Keys hypothesis that dietary fats were the cause of heart disease and should be shunned, remarkably became the dominant orthodoxy of US food policy, despite no robust evidence.

Fat Fiction unravels what led to the belief that saturated fat is bad for you. Saturated fat, in particular linked to animal fats, has been demonised for its role in cardiovascular disease. Immortalised in the longstanding US ‘food pyramid’, carbohydrates have for decades been the basis for a supposedly ‘healthy’ diet.

The film pulls up some extraordinary figures in terms of the resulting food policy that gained traction in the 1980s: servings of 7 – 11 slices of bread per day, 55% of calories coming from carbohydrates, and with fat consumption reduced to less than 10% of dietary consumption.

Gary Taubes, speaking in the film, argues that ‘…medical orthodoxy latched on to the wrong explanation and made a tragic mistake, and now we’re living with the consequences. It’s a fascinating watch and well worth the time. It will make you rethink how you eat and maybe even bring change for the better.

Rosamund Young, author of The Secret Life of Cows, reflects on Nicolette Hahn Niman’s book, which has just been revised and updated.

Nicolette Hahn Niman’s compelling argument for the value of ruminants and their integral relationship with land and soil, laid out in Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Food Production upends much of the thinking around whether or not we should be eating meat. Niman asserts the value of cattle, especially on lands that are not suited to growing food and she recognises the important role that red meat has in terms of nutrition and soil health, not to mention their power to sequester carbon.

The one thing you can trust cows to do is to eat the right things. Give them a whole supermarket of choice and, providing you haven’t bribed them – and therefore quite literally spoiled them – they will choose to eat what they were meant to eat and in so doing, they will be guaranteeing that the meat and milk they produce is beneficial to human beings.  

And vice versa: confine any animal and force it to eat something physiologically unnatural to it, like grain, and the resulting animal ‘products’ will be lacking in quality. 

You might well expect me to say that; I am a beef and sheep famer.  

Nicolette Hahn Niman is a cattle rancher. 

What unites us both far more than those facts, is a quite desperate longing to know; it is the pursuit of truth, no less. 

Defending Beef goes a very long way towards helping the reader navigate the overwhelming number of assertions, assumptions, facts, falsehoods, prejudices and fears that are currently worrying millions of people all over the world in relation to what they eat. 

It is painfully obvious that governments will not take sufficiently drastic action to slow, let alone reverse global warming and thus individuals have to be able to work out what they can do that will actually make a difference. Defending Beef offers clarity for individuals wanting to make such changes.  

In her book, Hahn Niman explains how she believed for thirty years that being a vegetarian was the right thing to do. While working as an environmental lawyer, she met her husband, a cattle rancher, and her eventual intimate knowledge of intensive and extensive farming systems, ability to gather and present vast oceans of statistics, her pursuit of truth with clear, unbiased eyes led her to realise that desisting from eating meat had not actually achieved anything. 

To say that this book is timely would be an understatement. We all need such a wealth of information to have any chance of making good decisions about our own health and the future of the planet. It is not just a matter of opinion or personal preference: facts are the tools we need. But humans – complicated humans – need more than facts, and the powerful vein of wisdom that runs through the entire text constantly refers back to those intangible necessities: a sense of belonging, being in harmony with the natural world, seeing and, crucially, doing things first hand. This helps us understanding the cycles that support life: food, air, love, true well-being, peace. 

Anyone wishing to cherry pick data to reinforce their own beliefs could find ammunition in this book. The reader is presented with details of the problems associated with keeping food animals as well as the benefits. Nothing is simply all right or all wrong – Hahn Niman addresses the nuances on both sides of the beef discussion. 

It’s not enough to read the reviews – everyone should read the whole book. But, keep in mind what the Los Angeles Times said: 

 ‘Hahn Niman is not trying to change your mind; she’s trying to save your world.’