Diet for a Hot Planet

Anna Lappé has an article in the recent issue of Edible Pioneer Valley that's worth checking out and serves as a nice introduction to her new book Diet for a Hot Planet. If you're local, you can pick up free copies all over the Valley, or check out their free online edition.

In 2006, Henning Steinfeld and colleagues at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization published a dense 390-page report called Livestock’s Long Shadow. Get past the mind-numbing figures and you’d absorb the report’s startling conclusion: Livestock production— especially the pressure on forests for pasture and crop production and the immense waste of industrial feedlots—contributes more to global warming than every single car, truck and plane on the planet. Move over, Hummer; say hello to the hamburger.

The entire food system—from seed to plate to landfill—is responsible for an estimated one-third of the escalating greenhouse gas emissions leading us toward climate catastrophe....

Despite the overwhelming evidence about the climate toll of global industrial agriculture, most of us are missing the story. When we think about climate-change bad guys, we would probably point to BP and ExxonMobil, before naming ADM and Cargill. Most of us are also largely unaware of the potential that sustainable, small-scale farming holds to both help us survive a climate-unstable future and mitigate global warming.

This lack of conversation and consciousness of industrial agriculture’s impact as well as the potential of a sustainable food system to heal the climate prompted me to pen my new book, Diet for a Hot Planet.

...read more

Exploring Queer Radicalism

This monthly study group/book club meets on the last Monday of every month and has recently made Food For Thought Books its new home! Join us this month on October 26th at 7pm for a discussion of From ACT UP to the WTO, an anthology that offers a history of ACT UP with a focus on new social movements, the use of street theater to reclaim public space, queer and sexual politics, new media/electronic civil disobedience, and race and community building.

Chávez creates overnight bestseller with book gift to Obama

"Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others."

In my political education Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano holds a central place. I can still remember the sensation I felt when I first read it years ago: the strange & heady vertigo one feels when the world is turned upside-down. Ever since, I have tried to get everyone I know to read it.

Now, Hugo Chávez has re-introduced this essential work to the world with really nothing more than a simple gesture: giving someone a book. I can only hope that Obama will read it. But even if he doesn't, Chávez's gift has ensured that thousands more surely will. That's good enough for me.

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Interested? Order this book from our store
Monthly Review Press: Open Veins of Latin America
Pre-order Galeano's new book: Mirrors, Stories of Almost Everyone

Douglas Blackmon wins Pulitzer Prize

Congratulations to Douglas Blackmon who has won a Pulitzer for his superlative work of historical investigation Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.

In school, many of us were taught that the Civil War ended slavery. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that while one form of enslavement fell with the war's end, another more insidious form rose to take its place. It was called the "convict lease system" and it exploited a loophole in the 13th amendment that allowed for slavery as punishment for a crime. African American men, recently emancipated but also jobless and without resources, were quickly rounded up and convicted on all manner of spurious and incidental charges. They were then leased to businesses and corporations who literally worked them to death building railroads, mining coal, and yes, even farming plantations once again. To call it "slavery by another name" is no exaggeration.

Armies of "free" black men labored without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced through beatings and physical torture to do the bidding of white masters for decades after the official abolition of American slavery.

The convict lease system has been condemned since its inception by many voices, including prominent ones like that of Frederick Douglass. But until recently, many did not know just how extensive (and how brutal) this system really was, not to mention how long such corporate exploitation of ex-slaves lasted (all the way up until WWII).

We owe this new knowledge to Blackmon's painstaking and exhaustive eight year long search through the court records of the time and his eloquent reconstruction of the stories these records revealed. His book is not an easy one to read. The truths he uncovers are dark and terrible ones about our history. But it is an important book, and a necessary one if we are ever to begin grappling with and healing the deep and open wound that we call race in this country. As Blackmon stated in a recent interview:

"What's clear is that the crimes against African American men were much greater than we have cared to acknowledge, and that you can't understand the state of race relations and the harm it has done to African Americans to this day without taking into account the harsh and terrible truth."

It is very gratifying to see such work get the honor and recognition it so rightfully deserves. Congratulations, Douglas Blackmon. You have earned it.

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order at our store: Slavery By Another Name
be sure to see: Douglas Blackmon's website
related news: Books That Explore Race in U.S. Lead Arts Pulitzers