The main reason I bought Animal, Vegetable, Junk is that I like Mark Bittman’s cookbooks. That’s sort of a weird reason to buy a book with no recipes in it, but I respect his culinary knowledge, and plus sustainable farming is something that interests me.
In the book, Bittman gives a history of agriculture, from neolithic to present day. He focuses a lot of his attention on the 20th century, when the concept of the factory farm and chemical manipulation of food really took hold. He ends on an optimistic note, describing small buy key worldwide innovations looking to turn the tide back towards a more sustainable form of agriculture, which he calls agroecology.
There wasn’t a ton of information in the book that was wholly new to me. Certainly there were aspects of how farming developed I didn’t know, but it’s hardly earth-shattering to read that monoculture farming destroys ecosystems and ruins soil, and that hyperprocessed food makes you sick. However, it was still an engaging read, full of anecdotes, well argued, and full of conviction without coming across as preachy or scolding. Bittman freely admits that the mantra of Personal Responsibility for diet can only get you so far, and puts the blame more on agribusiness, which makes it by design that the healthy, sustainable choice is almost always the difficult one.
The truth is, it doesn’t have to be this way, and I finished Bittman’s book feeling more optimistic than I’d expected to. It seems there are solutions out there, scalable ones. We just need to choose them. Or more importantly, hold our leaders’ feet to the fire until they choose them, too.