This was a great read. I learned a lot and look at food differently now. It has helped shaped better attitudes between me and the food I'm eating and ultimately helped me make better choices when it comes to food.

First off, I’m normally very choosy about even considering a nonfiction book to read. I work in the food industry as a cook and love all things food so when I saw the description of this, I became quite intrigued on how it would be. I was not disappointed. I never knew there were so many different ways to grow food or how much technology is now involved in the agricultural world. I loved learning about the evolution of the food we eat and saddened by how if we don’t continue to make changes in how we farm and eat that there won’t be enough food for future generations. Normally, a book like this would be very dry and almost like a textbook. This was not like that. While there were a few places that were like this, the majority was well written almost like she was talking to me. The only reason I give it 4 instead of 5 stars is because I probably wouldn’t read it a second time. It’s something I think is good to read once if you’re interested in the subject, but not worth a full reread.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you NetGalley and Crown Publishing for the opportunity.

THE FATE OF FOOD by Amanda Little, a professor of journalism and science writing at Vanderbilt University, is subtitled "What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World." In over a dozen chapters, she explores some really interesting – and disruptive – ideas like Impossible Meat product development and research into why humans crave meat. The CEO of Impossible Meats says, "our mission is to completely replace animals in the food system by 2035, which we will certainly do." Sound far-fetched? Maybe, but starting next week the Impossible Burger will be available at every Burger King. Amanda Little's research about our changing food supply led her to conduct interviews in a dozen countries and around the United States and she includes black and white photographs in this text. That helps envision some of these technologies and how wide-spread they are. Little deftly explains changes in agriculture, threats to the water supply, and evolving production processes (like vertical farming). For a quick overview, listen to Terry Gross' interview with her on NPR's Fresh Air. Notes and an index comprise about fifteen percent of THE FATE OF FOOD which received a starred review from Kirkus.

Links in live post:
https://impossiblefoods.com/burgerking/
https://www.npr.org/2019/06/02/729261391/fate-of-food-asks-what-s-for-dinner-in-a-hotter-drier-more-crowded-world

I found this book to be incredibly eye-opening, even alarming at times. The diversity of what Little covers is incredibly impressive, and more importantly the depth in which she dives into each topic is exhilarating. Sometimes Climate Change can feel abstract and out of reach. This book brings the topic right to your doorstep, and I hope that it opens more eyes to how our world is going to change, and what we can do to remedy that where possible, and prepare ourselves where not.

A definite eye opener of a book. Read this if you care about your food supply and the earth. It is very informative for any technical level to understand.

*** This ARC was received through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. ***

One of my big curiosities in life has been around, literally, the future of food in a landscape where climate change has affected our environment. I was pleasantly surprised when the author actually delivers on the premise, and with so much detail! I really enjoyed the back and forth on different technologies being utilized and developed, and the willingness to include negative aspects of our food system and technologies.

I was also intrigued by the chapter in lab grown meats, and the author’s willingness to go out of her way to all these different places for each subject. The farmed fish chapter was especially interesting to me given the interesting look at technology and the impact that fish have on the environment versus other types of meats.

The author does a great job at portraying the topics at hand, and I found myself reading large chunks at a time, because I wanted to know more! Food is an incredibly important part of all of our lives, and in the age of climate change, how will we adapt?

I was half expecting another doom and gloom book about how global climate change and big ag and their chemicals, pesticides and GMOs are destroying the Earth. There was some of that but this book contained so much more! It is a well-researched look at what is being developed to help cope with our changing world and how we grow and provide food for our burgeoning population. Amanda Little's writing style is very readable, in depth as she covers each topic but not dry or overly scientific. I found it all very interesting.

I received an arc of this new book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to the author for some interesting information.

This book is well written and researched. The author traveled far and wide to provide a look into what is currently being developed due to challenges from global warming. Each chapter deals with a different topic ranging from reestablishing ancient foods with some modifications, food waste, water, 3-D printed meat to creative crop growth strategies. It will be interesting to see which approaches gain momentum over the next few years and provide sustainable and affordable food for large populations.

I recomend this book for those looking for more information on the future of our food supply in a challenging, changing enviroment.

I received a free Kindle copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher with the understanding that I would post a review on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon and my fiction book review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook and Twitter pages.

Thank you Netgalley for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest.
This is a great in depth view on the future of agriculture. Can we truly maintain farming organic food? The author does a great job illustrating the difficulties farmers face with changing climate change and conditions with keeping up with the demand of consumers. Our food has already altered DNA, should we embrace the idea of genetically modified food? The author explores this controversy in a easy to follow and engaging format. Enjoyed it.

The first way is the crummy way that we've always done things -- wasteful, exploitive, short-sighted, brainless.

The second way is an attempt to remedy the first way by the joyless application of a thousand new rules, regulations, and prohibitions, to the point of criminalizing acting with normal levels of human self-interest.

The third way is, apparently, the unleashing of profit-driven creativity and new technology to remedy the problems created by the first way.

Will the third way actually work? I just finished reading a different good book that basically said that the third way is a bunch of pie-in-the-sky poppycock. Since I tend to agree with the last smart person I talked to, I was somewhat skeptical of the repeated invocations of the third way in the book I am reviewing here. However, the previous book also said that the rich people of the world needed to understand that they had to take less from the rest of us, a mass realization that seems unlikely to get any real traction in the foreseeable future, absent a wave of organized mass murder.

This is a book that chronicles a bunch of third-way solutions for problems which, in a more reasonable world than our own, would not be necessary, because we would have already gotten together and agreed not to foul our own nests any more than we have done already. Since the human race is apparently incapable of doing this, however, third-way solutions may be the best of the bad remaining options.

So, for example:

First way: Nine billion mouths to feed.
Second way: Force rich people to pay more for food than poor people.
Third way: Genetically modified foods.

First way: Spray a crapload of weedkiller on everything.
Second way: Forbid weedkiller, live with food shortages
Third way: Invent a robot that can kill weeds while leaving useful crops alone.

First way: Screw up the environment so that we cannot grow things outside.
Second way: Move food production to more hospitable climates, invading them if necessary.
Third way: Create food that will grow food inside.

First way: Eat meat a lot.
Second way: Count on prohibitive cost to limit demand
Third way: Grow meat in a laboratory

First way: Throw away a lot of food needlessly.
Second way: A patchwork of foodbanks and well-meaning individuals.
Third way: Spraying stuff on food to make it appealing-looking for longer.

First way: Fail to maintain a literally leaky infrastructure that loses an astounding quantity of water on its way to your faucet.
Second way: Pay higher taxes, dig up streets ceaselessly
Third way: Be Israel.

First way: Depend on rain from clouds.
Second way: Shake your head sadly over increased rates of farmer suicides.
Third way: Seed clouds (not actually an effective solution).

First way: Feed soldiers from mobile kitchens.
Second way: Meals, Ready-to-eat.
Third way: Print food on a 3-D printer.

I liked this book. It had interesting ideas, and seemed to say that all was not lost.

The wisdom in this book seemed to be similar to the wisdom that I read in other books, which comforts me because it helps me believe that the wisdom is actually wisdom and not just wishful thinking. For example, some of the ideas in the chapter on water overlapped with the ideas in another good book I read on the topic. I chose to believe that, instead of the two authors being joined in a conspiracy to pull the wool over the eyes of a doomed world, they had researched the topic of the future of water mindfully and independently of each other, and had reach similar, cautiously optimistic conclusions.

A fun fact: “... no food safety outbreak in the United States has ever been traced to a food being consumed past [its sell-by] date” (Kindle location 3168).

A fun quote from a social psychologist: “Accepting recycled wastewater is kind of like being asked to wear Hitler’s sweater. No matter how many times you clean the sweater, you just can’t take the Hitler out of it” (Kindle location 3509).

A less fun, but interesting, quote from a high-tech food entrepreneur: “Food is the fossil fuel of human energy. It is an enormous market full of waste, regulation, and biased allocation with serious geopolitical implications” (Kindle location 4267).

And a final word from the author herself: “It’s far more likely than not that there will be enough food for all of us, and that we’ll protect and preserve our food traditions” (Kindle location 4325).

I was given a free-of-charge egalley copy of this book for review. Thank you to Netgalley and Crown Publishing for their generosity.

An excellent book in the vein of Michael Pollen's "Omnivore's Dilemma." Amanda Little explores the nexus of ecology and technology in this thoughtfully written, well-researched book. She interviews and visits numerous food producers who use technology to sustainably improve the world's food supply. She admits to enjoying a cheap burger and coke on occasion, and she fesses up to pretty much failing in her attempts to grow her own food in her backyard garden in Nashville. Unlike many proponents of the sustainable food movement, the author is someone the average reader might relate to.

Highly recommended for those who care about sustainability, this book is like an "Omnivore's Dilemma 2.0," updating much of the subject matter covered by Michael Pollen's work and giving 21st century tech a fair shake.

An overview of the way our food is grown today .We are introduced to innovators around the world those concerned with the effects climate change will have on food and food production.Informative educational interesting highly recommend.#netgalley #thefateoffood#crownpublishing.

I really enjoyed this book. IT blends both warning and promise i the telling of how our food supply comes to market and the perils that can happen due to climate change. i enjoyed reading about all the different farmers and ranchers she met along the way and would recommend this book to others who are worried about climate change and also concerned about where their food is coming from.

This book explored up and coming food technologies set to revolutionize how we eat food. It looked at everything from GMOs to meatless meats, AI organic farming, zero-carbon foods, and everything in between. Little presented an objective viewpoint of each of these so called revolutionary methods, outlining both the pros and cons, as well as including substantial perspectives from the producers and owners of these technologies who in most cases face uncertainty about the outcome of their methods. The book was therefore neither pro food technology nor against it which was the right way to address these controversial ideas. The main question presented in this book was do the ethical concerns of these new sustainable food productions outweigh the urgency of the health of our planet and population? I must admit that I did not think much about food sustainability prior to reading this book, however, I finished this book feeling a little more pessimistic and uncomfortable with where food production seems to be heading. There are a lot of wrinkles that still need to be ironed out and not to mention more research conducted on the health and safety of these new techniques. If there is one thing for certain, it’s that 'The Fate of Food' will require compromises, an open mind, and a greater respect for Mother Nature.

When most of us in the wealthier pockets of the world think about the negative consequences of global warming, we often fixate on rising sea levels, massive storms, droughts, and other catastrophic weather events that can destroy homes and wipe out populations. These concerns are completely warranted, but as Amanda Little illustrates in her insightful new book The Fate of Food, our warming and crowding planet will also pose some large problems to the global food supply across all regions and income levels. Food production is forecasted to decline across the next several decades due to drought, changing temperatures, flooding, and less productive land and the world population is projected to 9.8 billion by 2050. In The Fate of Food, Little offers a tour of global food production innovations and highlights the various people, technologies, corporations, and organizations acting to help mitigate these issues and shape the future of what we’ll eat in the decades to come.

The book is structured around major innovation topics, including vertical farming, farming and harvesting robots, and meats produced in petri dishes. Little’s quest takes her across the world including stops in Norway, Silicon Valley, and Kenya and this globetrotting allows her to provide a rather comprehensive overview of the future of food across the world and not just limited to WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) nations, which is especially valuable given the increasing interconnectedness of our global food chain. Little, a journalist who has written about energy and the environment for over 15 years, does an outstanding job of distilling complex scientific concepts such as how cloud seeding works and how seesawing temperatures impact crop biology into digestible prose. The Fate of Food is also more than a science lesson and features some fun facts (including that Winston Churchill apparently foresaw the development of cultured meats in petri dishes in 1931) and profiles of some of the quirky and passionate personalities at the frontlines of food innovation including an aspiring Chinese organic food tycoon and Chris Newman, who overcame a tough upbringing in Southeast Washington DC to become a programmer at the Department o Homeland Security and then quite his job and become a permaculture farmer using traditional techniques of food production.

The title is a bit misleading, as Little showcases efforts to actively change the future of food and a dismal food future is by no means circumscribed. The Fate of Food is not a book-length warning siren and although Little clearly argues that maintaining the status quo will have some severely negative consequences she also offers up reasons for optimism based on the cutting-edge technologies showcased in her writing. Given that discussions of topics such as global warming and food consumption can become incendiary and have passions take priority over the facts and peer-reviewed scientific research, Little’s even-handedness is very refreshing. She is certainly a concerned global citizen who cares about our food future, but she does not have an agenda to push and she’s a realist throughout. It is illustrative that Little recounts dalliances with veganism and other movements that ultimately lost out to concerns over cost and convenience (and the delicious barbecue of her home state of Tennessee). The Fate of Food presents a platform for both sides of the issues on subjects like GMOs and she relies on the opinions of experts and cites respected studies, while also granting exposure to dissenting voices. Rather than wholeheartedly endorse traditional farming methods (which have issues at scaling affordably) or fully putting fate of global food supply in corporations and technocrats, Little advocates for a “third way” solution that forges a middle ground between groups arguing for the return of traditional food production methods and those advocating for completely technology-driven food solutions. Additionally, she recognizes that some of these problems are so complex that they often require the sizable budgets of humongous corporations such as Monsanto and Syngenta to properly research (though Little is by no means an apologist for these corporations and describes how big business certainly needs to shoulder some heavy blame for some of the problems facing the world food supply).

The Fate of Food does a strong job at covering most of the major areas in food innovation but I felt that Little could have spent more time discussing alternative proteins such as insects and the role of major food corporations such as Nestle and Pepsi in adapting to future sourcing and supply chain issues. NGOs and Silicon Valley startups can have a tremendous impact on solving the world’s food issues, but the big industrialized food companies will also have a huge role to play given their outsized role in feeding and hydrating the masses. Little does devote some pages to chemical companies and interviews the CEO of Tyson Foods but she only scratches the surface of a subject that will be crucial in shaping the future of our food. That was really my only (slight) criticism, however, and I found The Fate of Food quite enjoyable overall. Little’s book does a fine job of both educating and entertaining and anyone looking to better understand the issues facing the global food supply and the most promising approaches to solving them should check it out.

8/10

In one of the most thorough, detailed and well-organized discovery tour of anything related to food, Little provides an accessible narrative to understand current threats, key aspects any potential solution should consider, and the innovative efforts that are trying to address them, and issues that may limit or accelerate scaling of those innovations. What makes this book stand apart is the pragmatic tone taken throughout the book - not cheerleading of fake meat/vegetarianism or appealing to emotions - nor scare tactics on GMOs. Also, by adopting a global perspective, Little does this genre a great service by expanding beyond the typical US-centric narratives.

Each chapter in the book addresses a very specfic issue - water, automation, meat farms, meat culture farms, waste management. For me, the chapters on automation and waste management were the favorites (mostly because of my tech background and the clear opportunities that Little touches upon where tech can actually be a benevolent force). Written in first person account, the book blends research, travel, and observations well. She does reinforce stereotypes of tofu not being necessarily tasty and doesn't somewhat leaves out the need for humans to change their own behavior as part of the solution (whether its awareness of food miles, forced aesthetics, etc.). Perhaps not wanting to sound too preachy, she treats the behavioral aspects of consumption with kid gloves - one wishes she had written a detailed separate chapter on this aspect with the same thoroughness she has displayed in all the tech issues. The future of food has scary challenges, but seeing it as mostly a tech-fueled portfolio of solutions can be misleading if not seen directly hand-in-hand with the personal "sacrifices" and behavior changes that need to accompany them. Overall, a great read.