An unsettling journey into the United States' disaster-bound food system, and an exploration of possible solutions, from leading food politics commentator and farmer-turned-journalist Tom Philpott.

Food journalist Barry Estabrook reveals the huge human and environmental cost of the $5 billion fresh tomato industry and the price we pay as a society when we take taste and thought out of our food purchases.

"The story of phosphorus spans the globe and vast tracts of human history. The race to mine phosphorus took people from the battlefields of Waterloo, which were looted for the bones of fallen soldiers, to the fabled guano islands off Peru, the Bone Valley of Florida, and the sand dunes of the Western Sahara. Over the past century, phosphorus has made farming vastly more productive, feeding the enormous increase in the human population. Yet, as Egan...

How humankind first hunted and gathered explains our emergence as a new species and our earliest technology. Our first food systems, from fire to agriculture, tell where we settled and how civilizations expanded. The quest for food for growing populations drove exploration, colonialism, slavery, even capitalism. A century ago, food was industrialized. Since then, new styles of agriculture and food production have written a new chapter of human history,...

"This STEM-based set of True Books introduces students to the engineering innovations that can help us reach more environmentally friendly goals"-- "Envision a brighter future with this STEM-based subset of True Books.Thanks to the development of agriculture, our Earth can feed the almost 8 billion people that call it home. But the challenge facing us today is how to make the practice of large-scalefarming sustainable. We have learned how to use...