Diet for a Dead Planet: Surprising Insights into Agriculture's Unseen Underbelly

Our current system of corporate-dominated, industrial-style farming might not resemble the old-fashioned farms of yore, but the modern method of raising food has been a surprisingly long time in the making.

That's one of the astonishing revelations found in Christopher D. Cook's "Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis" (2004, 2006, The New Press), which explores in great detail the often unappealing, yet largely unseen, underbelly of today's food production and processing machine. While some of the material will be familiar to those who've read Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" or Eric Schlosser's "Fast-Food Nation," Cook's work provides many new insights for anyone who's concerned about how and what we eat, and how those choices affect animals, the environment and other people around the world.

Cook persuasively argues that the forces favoring large-scale, big-money agriculture have been at work since the earliest days of the American Republic, when Alexander Hamilton's vision of a free-market farm system battled Thomas Jefferson's ideal of the yeoman farmer as the cornerstone of an agrarian democracy.

"True freedom and independence, as well as genuine political participation, could only come through one's ownership and use of land," Cook writes. "Jefferson linked giving free land to small farmers, and taxing estates, with egalitarian democratic development. Ultimately, however, Alexander Hamilton's free-market agenda, which promoted land speculation and ownership for the highest bidder, prevailed, despite the periodic interruptions of homestead policies."

While those and subsequent developments -- expensive, high-tech farm automation, assembly-line livestock raising and slaughtering, high-yield but costly genetically modified crops, monoculture cropping and subsidy-driven global trade -- have generated an unprecedented surplus of food, they haven't translated into benefits for small farmers or even, ultimately, consumers, Cook argues.

However, he closes his book on a positive not by reviewing some of the burgeoning movements seeking a better way of producing and distributing food: farm-to-cafeteria programs, community-supported agriculture, farmers' markets, community gardens and more.

"What could be more important for sustaining both present and future generations than providing good food in a manner that sustains not only its consumers and its producers but also the planet itself?" Cook asks at the book's conclusion. "There must be a larger commitment that ... takes into account the needs of the whole society -- consumers, workers, farmers, the environment, and even animals -- and not just the concern of one group or another. Food is part of the web of life. How we produce and consume it is a measure of a people."

After reading Cook's insights into how we produce and consume our food, it's likely you'll never look at a simple lunch or dinner the same way again.