Related books
A page can only say so much. These are the longer arguments behind the questions we ask: what food is becoming, what it costs the land and the sea, and what people disagree about.
We check every title, author and first publication year against its library catalogue record, on the date on the card. We take no commission, no publisher pays for a place here, and every link goes to a library catalogue rather than a shop.
25 books · 5 shelves · every record checked 19 September 2026
This is the reading half of What we know: other people's books, each with one checked record and our note on why it is here. The answers themselves — one fixed question at a time, every factual sentence gated — are the entries in that section.
7 books
Books about growing meat from cells, fermenting protein, and the companies and people trying to change what a farm is for.
2022 · Open Library record
George Monbiot · first published 2022
Our note: the case that how we farm, not only what we eat, is the problem — and that the answer may be less land, not more. The book that sent a lot of readers looking for precision fermentation.
Goes with How is precision-fermented protein actually made, and where is it approved?
2021 · Open Library record
Larissa Zimberoff · first published 2021
Our note: a reporter's tour of the ingredients and companies behind 'food tech', including the ones that never reach a shelf.
No entry of ours answers this yet.
2020 · Open Library record
Chase Purdy · first published 2020
Our note: the money and the people behind the first alternative-protein boom, reported from inside it.
Goes with What is cultivated meat, and where can anyone actually buy it?
2019 · Open Library record
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft · first published 2019
Our note: a historian's essay on cultivated meat as an idea — what it promises, and what it quietly leaves unanswered.
Goes with What is cultivated meat, and where can anyone actually buy it?
2018 · Open Library record
Paul Shapiro · first published 2018
Our note: the book that popularised 'clean meat', written while the companies it describes were still promises. It is by Paul Shapiro — the name we are most often asked to check.
Goes with What is cultivated meat, and where can anyone actually buy it?
2018 · Open Library record
Jacy Reese · first published 2018
Our note: how the movement argues, organises and measures itself, written to be read by people who disagree.
Goes with What is cultivated meat, and where can anyone actually buy it?
2008 · Open Library record
Pamela C. Ronald and R. W. Adamchak · first published 2008
Our note: a plant geneticist and an organic farmer make the case that the two camps can share a field. Background for the gene-edited-food question we have not answered yet.
No entry of ours answers this yet.
7 books
What farming does to a planet, what a hotter world does to food, and what can be grown in water instead of soil.
2024 · Open Library record
Hannah Ritchie · first published 2024
Our note: the data-led answer to climate despair, with food, farming and land use as its largest worked example.
Goes with Where does algae protein come from, and what can you actually buy?
2023 · Open Library record
Vincent Doumeizel · first published 2023
Our note: the argument that the ocean can be farmed for food, feed and material at a scale land cannot match.
Goes with Where does algae protein come from, and what can you actually buy?
2019 · Open Library record
Amanda Little · first published 2019
Our note: reporting from the places already adapting their food to a hotter, drier and less predictable world.
No entry of ours answers this yet.
2019 · Open Library record
Bren Smith · first published 2019
Our note: a working account of growing seaweed and shellfish at sea, and an honest one about how hard that is.
Goes with Where does algae protein come from, and what can you actually buy?
2011 · Open Library record
Anna Lappe · first published 2011
Our note: the argument that the food system is both a casualty of a hotter world and one of its causes.
No entry of ours answers this yet.
2017 · Open Library record
Paul Hawken · first published 2017
Our note: the ranked inventory of what actually reduces emissions, in which food and land use take most of the top places.
No entry of ours answers this yet.
2019 · Open Library record
Jonathan Safran Foer · first published 2019
Our note: the case that individual food choice is a climate lever, stated as an argument rather than a finding.
No entry of ours answers this yet.
4 books
The older craft that newer food borrows its language from, and the kingdom that makes both bread and mycoprotein.
2020 · Open Library record
Merlin Sheldrake · first published 2020
Our note: fungi as a way of seeing the world — background for anything grown from moulds or mycelium, and a good read on its own.
Goes with What is mycoprotein, and is it a fungus or a fermentation?
2012 · Open Library record
Sandor Ellix Katz · first published 2012
Our note: the reference on fermentation as a household craft, and the older tradition that newer food borrows the word from.
No entry of ours answers this yet.
2018 · Open Library record
René Redzepi and David Zilber · first published 2018
Our note: the restaurant that made fermentation a modern technique rather than a traditional one.
No entry of ours answers this yet.
2020 · Open Library record
Rich Shih and Jeremy Umansky · first published 2020
Our note: one mould, many foods — the clearest demonstration that a fungus is a production method and not a category.
No entry of ours answers this yet.
3 books
How food is made into a health question, and how money shapes what nutrition research finds.
2023 · Open Library record
Chris van Tulleken · first published 2023
Our note: the case that the processing, not only the ingredient list, is the health question — and the reason our entries refuse to give health advice.
No entry of ours answers this yet.
2018 · Open Library record
Marion Nestle · first published 2018
Our note: the reason this site takes no money from food companies, told through the studies that were quietly funded.
No entry of ours answers this yet.
2013 · Open Library record
Michael Moss · first published 2013
Our note: how the processed-food industry engineered the products that the ultra-processed debate is about.
No entry of ours answers this yet.
4 books
The shelf would be dishonest without it. This book argues the other side.
2010 · Open Library record
Simon Fairlie · first published 2010
Our note: the strongest book-length argument that some livestock belongs in a sustainable food system. We list it because a shelf without it would only be telling you what you already expect to hear.
No entry of ours answers this yet.
2006 · Open Library record
Michael Pollan · first published 2006
Our note: the book that taught a generation of readers to ask where a meal comes from, and the reason that question now has a directory behind it.
No entry of ours answers this yet.
2007 · Open Library record
Barbara Kingsolver · first published 2007
Our note: a year of eating from one place, which is the local question this site answers with dates and branches instead of seasons.
No entry of ours answers this yet.
2014 · Open Library record
Dan Barber · first published 2014
Our note: a chef's argument that the plate has to change with the land rather than the land with the plate.
No entry of ours answers this yet.
Every card carries one checked line: the title, the author and the year the book was first published, read from the book's Open Library catalogue record and retrieved on the date shown. The check is mechanical, and it is the reason a wrong author name fails here rather than reaching you.
"Our note" is our own writing about why the book is on the shelf. It is not a summary and not a claim about the world, and we have not read every book on this list to write this page. Where a book bears on one of our entries, the card links to that entry so you can compare them.
A book is one voice, and it can be wrong about a detail without being worthless. Listing is not endorsement, and we add a book when it does a job the entries cannot: a long argument, a piece of reporting, or a case we disagree with.
The links go to library catalogue records, not to a shop. We earn nothing from this page.
— no named reviewer has reviewed this list, and no bookseller or publisher has. It is a reading list by this site. This section is unfunded: it takes no sponsorship, and no funder may be a company whose products the entries or the directory describe.
The entries answer one question each, from dated sources. The directory is where those questions meet something you can actually buy.