Hamburgers in Paradise: The Stories behind the Food We Eat
A fascinating exploration of our past, present, and future relationship with food

For the first time in human history, there is food in abundance throughout the world. More people than ever before are now freed of the struggle for daily survival, yet few of us are aware of how food lands on our plates. Behind every meal you eat, there is a story. Hamburgers in Paradise explains how.

In this wise and passionate book, Louise Fresco takes readers on an enticing cultural journey to show how science has enabled us to overcome past scarcities—and why we have every reason to be optimistic about the future. Using hamburgers in the Garden of Eden as a metaphor for the confusion surrounding food today, she looks at everything from the dominance of supermarkets and the decrease of biodiversity to organic foods and GMOs. She casts doubt on many popular claims about sustainability, and takes issue with naïve rejections of globalization and the idealization of "true and honest" food. Fresco explores topics such as agriculture in human history, poverty and development, and surplus and obesity. She provides insightful discussions of basic foods such as bread, fish, and meat, and intertwines them with social topics like slow food and other gastronomy movements, the fear of technology and risk, food and climate change, the agricultural landscape, urban food systems, and food in art.

The culmination of decades of research, Hamburgers in Paradise provides valuable insights into how our food is produced, how it is consumed, and how we can use the lessons of the past to design food systems to feed all humankind in the future.

1121862510
Hamburgers in Paradise: The Stories behind the Food We Eat
A fascinating exploration of our past, present, and future relationship with food

For the first time in human history, there is food in abundance throughout the world. More people than ever before are now freed of the struggle for daily survival, yet few of us are aware of how food lands on our plates. Behind every meal you eat, there is a story. Hamburgers in Paradise explains how.

In this wise and passionate book, Louise Fresco takes readers on an enticing cultural journey to show how science has enabled us to overcome past scarcities—and why we have every reason to be optimistic about the future. Using hamburgers in the Garden of Eden as a metaphor for the confusion surrounding food today, she looks at everything from the dominance of supermarkets and the decrease of biodiversity to organic foods and GMOs. She casts doubt on many popular claims about sustainability, and takes issue with naïve rejections of globalization and the idealization of "true and honest" food. Fresco explores topics such as agriculture in human history, poverty and development, and surplus and obesity. She provides insightful discussions of basic foods such as bread, fish, and meat, and intertwines them with social topics like slow food and other gastronomy movements, the fear of technology and risk, food and climate change, the agricultural landscape, urban food systems, and food in art.

The culmination of decades of research, Hamburgers in Paradise provides valuable insights into how our food is produced, how it is consumed, and how we can use the lessons of the past to design food systems to feed all humankind in the future.

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Hamburgers in Paradise: The Stories behind the Food We Eat

Hamburgers in Paradise: The Stories behind the Food We Eat

by Louise O. Fresco
Hamburgers in Paradise: The Stories behind the Food We Eat

Hamburgers in Paradise: The Stories behind the Food We Eat

by Louise O. Fresco

Hardcover(Translatio)

$42.00 
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Overview

A fascinating exploration of our past, present, and future relationship with food

For the first time in human history, there is food in abundance throughout the world. More people than ever before are now freed of the struggle for daily survival, yet few of us are aware of how food lands on our plates. Behind every meal you eat, there is a story. Hamburgers in Paradise explains how.

In this wise and passionate book, Louise Fresco takes readers on an enticing cultural journey to show how science has enabled us to overcome past scarcities—and why we have every reason to be optimistic about the future. Using hamburgers in the Garden of Eden as a metaphor for the confusion surrounding food today, she looks at everything from the dominance of supermarkets and the decrease of biodiversity to organic foods and GMOs. She casts doubt on many popular claims about sustainability, and takes issue with naïve rejections of globalization and the idealization of "true and honest" food. Fresco explores topics such as agriculture in human history, poverty and development, and surplus and obesity. She provides insightful discussions of basic foods such as bread, fish, and meat, and intertwines them with social topics like slow food and other gastronomy movements, the fear of technology and risk, food and climate change, the agricultural landscape, urban food systems, and food in art.

The culmination of decades of research, Hamburgers in Paradise provides valuable insights into how our food is produced, how it is consumed, and how we can use the lessons of the past to design food systems to feed all humankind in the future.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780691163871
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication date: 10/27/2015
Edition description: Translatio
Pages: 560
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Louise O. Fresco is president of Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands. The author of several books, she is a member of the Council of Advisors for the World Food Prize and has worked extensively in developing countries for many years. She lives in Amsterdam.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION Food—A Voyage of Discovery ix

ONE Paradise: An Exceptional Ecology 1

Pictures of Paradise 1

Paradise as an Ecosystem 8

Paradise Measured against an Ecological Yardstick 11

Paradise as a Garden 15

The Paradise Theory 19

TWO Eve's Temptation: Apple and Hamburger 27

Fall and Knowledge 27

Scarcity and Temptation 33

Rules and Taboos 37

Eve's Hamburger 42

THREE Agriculture: A Triumph of Hard Work 49

Agriculture as Myth 49

The Very Beginning 53

Domestication of Plants and Animals 61

Farming as an Ecological Balancing Act 68

The Dominant Form of Land Use 72

Agriculture as a Matter of Public Interest 79

FOUR Bread: The Most Iconic of Foods 83

Bread as a Symbol 83

Bread as a Staple 88

Carbohydrates 97

Bread and Health 99

FIVE Meat: Necessity and Luxury 103

The Omnivorous Human 107

Essential Nutrients 113

Meat as an Unavoidable By-Product 115

Animal Proteins Have a Place in Almost All Cultures 117

Unease and Change 123

Traditional and Ritual Slaughter 128

Dangers of Livestock Farming 130

New Proteins, New Ideas 132

Meat Avoiders, Meat Reducers, and Flexitarians 137

SIX Liquid Paradise: Food from Water 141

Darting Fish and Dark Monsters 141

Human and Fish 145

From Fish 'n' Chips to Sashimi 152

Seas of Plenty 157

Taming Fish: Aquaculture 162

From Plenty to an Awareness of Scarcity 165

SEVEN Hairy Apples: The Challenge of Biotechnology 171

On Chaos, Monsters, and Paradise 171

Genetic Intervention as Part of Our History 174

Genetic Modification as Continuity and Discontinuity 179

The End and the Means 186

Biotechnology, Hunger, and Poverty (1): The Case of Cassava 189

Biotechnology, Hunger, and Poverty (2): Golden Rice 194

Risks and Continuing Controversies 197

Genetic Resources Aplenty 204

Lost Innocence 208

EIGHT Homesick for Paradise: "Organic" and "Natural" 213

"Organic" and "Natural" as a Moral Choice 213

Related Ideas 219

What Exactly Is "Organic"? 223

Is Organic Better? 227

The Weight of Good Intentions 236

NINE Biodiversity: From Landscape to Gene 243

The Renaissance of the Countryside 246

From Countryside to Cultivated Landscape 251

Farming and Biological Diversity 255

Diversity and Food Security 262

TEN Roast Wolf and Deconstructed Olive: Cooking and Eating as a Worldview 275

Cooking and Eating in the Food Chain 275

Raw, Cooked, and Pure 281

Food as a Mirror of a Changing World 290

Cooking as Construct and Philosophy 296

Slow Food and Whole Food 299

Dinner's Ready! 303

Eating and Cooking as a Dilemma 307

ELEVEN Paradise on Every Street Corner: Food in the City 311

Onions beside the Highways 311

The Belly of the City 319

Daily Temptation: The Supermarket 324

The City as a Public Eating Place 330

Food and Green Places as Urban Counterculture 335

City Farming: The New Interweaving of the City and Food Production 338

The High-Tech Green Metropolis 341

TWELVE An Embarrassment of Riches: The Food Chain 345

The Long Road from Farm to Fork 345

Safe, but Not Risk Free 349

Chained by Chains 354

The Dilemmas of Human Food Supplies 361

Reading Food: Logos, Certificates, and Labels 368

THIRTEEN A Shrinking Paradise: Back to Scarcity? 375

Paradise in Crisis 375

Nature and Guilt 380

How Scarcity Disappeared 386

Trouble in Paradise: Real Scarcity and Shrinkage 389

Paradise Won and Lost 399

FOURTEEN A Paradise within Reach: Sustainable Food Production 403

The Future Is Now 403

Lessons of the Green Revolution 408

The Price of Food 414

Sustainability as Political Consensus 417

Market Failures 421

Small Farms: The Key to Sustainable Food? 425

Sustainable Green Revolutions 428

FIFTEEN Food: Irresistible and Emotionally Charged 437

Hunger and Scarcity 437

Beyond Paradise: The Distribution of Scarcity 441

The Obesogenic Environment 444

Fat or Lean 448

Emotionally Charged Food 454

Food Choice and Moderation 457

From Abundance to a Healthy Balance 461

SIXTEEN In Conclusion: Eve's Paradise 471

The Hamburgerization of the World 471

Paradise Lost and Found 475

The Great Stalemate 479

Dietary Laws, Again 483

And Paradise? 487

Bibliography 491

Index 519

Color plates follow pages 174 and 270.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"An extraordinary, engaging, and culturally informed volume. Read it and be freed from the shackles of many mistaken ideas that obscure genuine solutions to the puzzle of feeding a growing world population in a sustainable and just fashion. Fresco invites us to leave our preconceived ideas at the threshold and become better stewards of mankind's future."—Harold T. Shapiro, Princeton University

"An insightful and incisive book that examines the facts and mythologies of food production, ancient and modern. Fresco moves seamlessly from early concepts of paradise to contemporary issues such as factory farming, GMOs, and organic agriculture. She concludes with a balanced and optimistic view of the future of sustainable farming."—Gordon Conway, Imperial College London

"In a mesmerizing tour de force by an author who has clearly established herself as the Renaissance Woman of Global Agriculture, Louise Fresco tracks the ten-thousand-year evolution of human agriculture in search of the paradise of abundance. Throughout this book, she weaves the extraordinary cultural intersection of art, poetry, and religion with science and technology, and confronts the dichotomy of a ‘hamburgerized' twenty-first-century world of overabundance and painful scarcity."—Kenneth M. Quinn, president of the World Food Prize Foundation

"This erudite and wide-ranging book is the result of Fresco's four decades of work and reflection on how our food is produced and consumed. In contemporary literature about the future of the food chain, I have not come across a more convincing, irresistibly organized, and thorough overview of what we all need to digest. This book is a must-read."—Victor Halberstadt, Leiden University

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