Harvest for Hope

Amazingly enough I've become something of a slow reader since I started playing WoW. What used to take me three days to read now takes a couple weeks. I used to read a book a week at my slowest. Now it takes me a couple weeks to finish some of the fastest books. It's something that I'm going to look to correct, but for right now I plod through books when I used to glide. 

So when I say that it has taken me weeks to read Jane Goodall's Harvest for Hope, it is not because of any flaw with the book. In fact this book is wonderful. It will gladly go onto my shelf for future perusal. Harvest For Hope is a book about the food industry and all the issues and challenges that face it. Food production has changed completely in the last 50 or so years and not for the better. Corporations control too much of our food supply now, monocrops dominate farms, and animals are kept as commodities not living things. So many of us have no concept of where our food comes from or the huge lengths it goes to, getting to our plates. 

Goodall presents all this information in her standard direct way but she is quick to point out ways in which we can improve the system. The tone of several sections are bleak but there is always hope at the end of each chapter. Her section on local eating is fascinating. There are a ton of slow food, local food movements out there that I was not aware of. The sections of factory farms for animal products made me physically ill and continues to cement my decision to be vegetarian, no matter how often Jeff offers me bacon. :-) 

Goodall touches on the natural order of eating, animal rights, genetically modified foods, obesity rates, water issues, and corporate control. None of this information was new but the solutions Goodall offers are not normally given in these types of books. I came away feeling more hopeful then I did after reading Fast Food Nation. Like reading The Jungle by Upton Sinclair in high school, these books make a huge impact in the way I view my world. Goodall's section of fish farming was new and very eye-opening. I was not aware of how often these farms contaminate the wild fish that live nearby. The sections on local foods made me want to start growing my own vegetables. I'll have to start a small garden this summer. 

Again not a lot of new information (after having read multiple books on food production) but told in a wonderful way. I felt dispair and I felt hope within a couple pages of each other. A call to arms if I ever read one. For anyone interested in all sections of food production, it is a must read.