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What Everyone Needs to Know
Agricultural and Food Controversies: What Everyone Needs to Know
The world is more interested in issues surrounding agricultural and food issues than ever before. Are pesticides safe? Should we choose locally grown food? Why do some people embrace new agricultural technologies while others steadfastly defend traditional farming methods? In the debates about organic food, genetically modified organisms, and farm animal welfare, it's not always clear what the scientific studies are actually telling us.
To understand these controversies and more, the authors of Agricultural and Food What Everyone Needs to Know begin by encouraging readers to develop an understanding of how two well-educated people can form radically different opinions about food. Sometimes the disputes are scientific in nature, and sometimes they arise from conflicting ethical views. This book confronts the most controversial issues in agriculture by first explaining the principles of each side of the debate, guiding readers through the scientific literature so that they can form their own educated opinions.
Questions
- Are organic foods truly better for your health?
- Are chemical fertilizers sustainable, or are we producing cheap food at the expense of future generations?
- What foods should we eat to have a smaller carbon footprint?
- Does buying local food stimulate the local economy?
- Why are so many farm animals raised indoors?
- Should antibiotics be given to livestock?
- Is genetically-modified food the key to global food security, and does it give corporations too much market power?
- Is the prevalence of corn throughout the food system the result of farm subsidies?
Providing a combination of research and popular opinions on both sides of the issue, Agricultural and Food What Everyone Needs to Know allows readers to decide for themselves what they personally value and believe to be important when it comes to their food.
To understand these controversies and more, the authors of Agricultural and Food What Everyone Needs to Know begin by encouraging readers to develop an understanding of how two well-educated people can form radically different opinions about food. Sometimes the disputes are scientific in nature, and sometimes they arise from conflicting ethical views. This book confronts the most controversial issues in agriculture by first explaining the principles of each side of the debate, guiding readers through the scientific literature so that they can form their own educated opinions.
Questions
- Are organic foods truly better for your health?
- Are chemical fertilizers sustainable, or are we producing cheap food at the expense of future generations?
- What foods should we eat to have a smaller carbon footprint?
- Does buying local food stimulate the local economy?
- Why are so many farm animals raised indoors?
- Should antibiotics be given to livestock?
- Is genetically-modified food the key to global food security, and does it give corporations too much market power?
- Is the prevalence of corn throughout the food system the result of farm subsidies?
Providing a combination of research and popular opinions on both sides of the issue, Agricultural and Food What Everyone Needs to Know allows readers to decide for themselves what they personally value and believe to be important when it comes to their food.
- GenresEnvironmentNonfiction
168 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2014
14 people are currently reading
43 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
August 5, 2015
This book had such promise. I was really looking for a balanced view of the food and agriculture debates and, on the surface, this book REALLY seemed to fit the bill. Then I read it. :)
Essentially, each chapter begins by explaining a certain controversy (GMOs, the farm bill, eating local, etc). So far so good. The summary of each issue is good and the authors are obviously educated about the topics. This is what earned the book a minimum of 2 stars.
However, the rest of each chapter essentially argues whether the controversy is legit or not. In this section the arguments really start to contradict each other. They say things in one sentence like: we have full trust in corporations and regulators to keep our food safe.... then a few paragraphs later they'll say: it is true that Monsanto is beholden to it's stake holders and aims to make a profit above everything else including responsibility for the environment.
They'll then say something like: it's great that food advocates exist because they keep corporations honest and regulators on top of things. But then they go on to say that without food advocates corporations would do the right thing anyway because it benefits them. What?!
The chapter on the farm bill is an even bigger joke. They claim that if we stopped subsidizing corn and soy that, essentially, people would eat just as much junk food. Really? So that cheap junk food would stay cheap with no subsidies and farmers would continue to grow just as much corn? It just gets to the point where they're talking jibberish.
The book says countless times "if you don't trust corporations to do the right thing on their own, then maybe our food isn't safe. But we do trust them. So it is."
Yikes. Seriously?
Every chapter ends by basically telling you that corporations will do the right thing and if they don't, well, the next round of biotech will fix everything...or regulators will fix it eventually. They never come to the obvious conclusion that, well, maybe Big Ag isn't good! And in fact may be the problem all along!
I don't mind someone concluding that our food system is safe (I think for the most part it is). I do mind them making contradictory arguments and then stating a forgone conclusion.
If this wasn't published by Oxford Univ. Press, I'd say this book was paid for by Monsanto and their pals. The conclusions you're given are THAT lopsided.
If you want to hear what it sounds like when big ag argues they're just as good (or better!) for everyone as organic growers and small farms...this book is for you.
Essentially, each chapter begins by explaining a certain controversy (GMOs, the farm bill, eating local, etc). So far so good. The summary of each issue is good and the authors are obviously educated about the topics. This is what earned the book a minimum of 2 stars.
However, the rest of each chapter essentially argues whether the controversy is legit or not. In this section the arguments really start to contradict each other. They say things in one sentence like: we have full trust in corporations and regulators to keep our food safe.... then a few paragraphs later they'll say: it is true that Monsanto is beholden to it's stake holders and aims to make a profit above everything else including responsibility for the environment.
They'll then say something like: it's great that food advocates exist because they keep corporations honest and regulators on top of things. But then they go on to say that without food advocates corporations would do the right thing anyway because it benefits them. What?!
The chapter on the farm bill is an even bigger joke. They claim that if we stopped subsidizing corn and soy that, essentially, people would eat just as much junk food. Really? So that cheap junk food would stay cheap with no subsidies and farmers would continue to grow just as much corn? It just gets to the point where they're talking jibberish.
The book says countless times "if you don't trust corporations to do the right thing on their own, then maybe our food isn't safe. But we do trust them. So it is."
Yikes. Seriously?
Every chapter ends by basically telling you that corporations will do the right thing and if they don't, well, the next round of biotech will fix everything...or regulators will fix it eventually. They never come to the obvious conclusion that, well, maybe Big Ag isn't good! And in fact may be the problem all along!
I don't mind someone concluding that our food system is safe (I think for the most part it is). I do mind them making contradictory arguments and then stating a forgone conclusion.
If this wasn't published by Oxford Univ. Press, I'd say this book was paid for by Monsanto and their pals. The conclusions you're given are THAT lopsided.
If you want to hear what it sounds like when big ag argues they're just as good (or better!) for everyone as organic growers and small farms...this book is for you.
June 5, 2025
Reading this book turned out to be a bit of a masochistic endeavor, even for a food controversy moderate such as myself. I will spare the reader my many pages of margin notes about the flagrant biases of this book and simply highlight one passage that captured all of the authors’ (note that there are four, all “Agricultural Economists” or something of the like) worst tendencies:
In a chapter on “The GMO Controversy”, the authors explore “both sides” (more on how poorly they execute this stated objective later) of the debate over whether DNA-splicing GMO development presents ethical, commercial, and/or legal risks to the American public. I agree with the authors’ position that today’s GMOs do not fundamentally differ from the GMOs that emerged during the first agricultural revolution. But there are professional, footnoted ways to articulate this point that one would expect of an Oxford University Press volume. Instead, the authors default to a wild series of contradictory and poorly-cited claims about the food industry to justify their essentially libertarian position that GMOs are harmless and regulating them is a waste of time.
In one passage addressing potential loopholes in the FDA regulatory process, for example, the authors assert that “because people working for seed companies are just as ethical as everyone else, it follows that they also work with the FDA because it’s the right thing to do” (p. 63). I am currently studying for the LSAT; to my mind, this sentence could justify at least 3 exam questions about logical fallacies and unsound premises. How naive does one have to be to simply take at face value that a group of people is ethical, let alone “just as ethical as everyone else”? How do we know that presumably ethical people will inherently work with a regulatory agency? What if the agency in question is unethical, thus disincentivizing cooperation with the agency by ethical actors? Does a profit motive not inherently urge against regulatory compliance since regulations mitigate the externalities of unfettered business?
Two pages later, the authors assert that “There are well-qualified dissenting scientists and a motivated group of food activists behind them" (p. 65). The intellectual dishonesty to refer to profit-motivated businesspeople as “ethical” while pointing to activists with no apparent interest other than their own health as “motivated” is astonishing. But the straw-manning gets worse when the authors describe these activists as falling for a “conspiracy theory”. The authors argue as follows: activists whistleblow about the FDA to Big Agriculture pipeline, within which regulators retire from civil service and take cushy jobs in the lucrative food industry that they were charged with regulating only months before. Activists track the individuals who have made this transition and public names of pipeline members online. Activists often point to this Conflict of Interest as reason to distrust the FDA’s neutral position on GMOs (among other issues, which the authors carefully neglect to acnkowledge). Third party regulators agree with the FDA that GMOs are essentially harmless. Therefore, all activists who worry about GMOs and/or about conflicts of interest have gotten caught up in conspiracies.
I happen to agree with the authors that food activists’ concerns about conflicts of interest do not justify a wholehearted rejection of GMOs. It does not follow from the existence of a conflict of interest in Big Ag that the actual entities in conflicted interest - Big Ag and the FDA - are necessarily doing anything harmful. We cannot say for sure that Big Ag is hiding something crucial from regulators about GMOs without evidence of that data itself.
But the conflict of interest created by the FDA to Big Agriculture pipeline is real and terrifying, and it incentivizes conspiratorial thinking by undermining the public’s trust in both regulatory institutions and food companies at large. The authors’ dismissal of these simple facts suggests that they themselves are not neutral actors because they do not accept very real objections to a very real problem in the food industry. This kind of logic offers a template for their argumentation throughout the text: describe a legitimate objection to your food policy position before dismissing it without justification and calling your opponents shrill and uneducated for worrying about nothing-burgers.
Just to demonstrate that I have not fallen prey to conspiratorial thinking myself: a page later, accusations become admission when the authors cite a John Stossel Fox Business interview (no biases there, right?). During this segment, a liberal think-tank policy wonk faces off against, and seems to lose an argument to, OSU professor Jayson Lusky. Dr. Lusky happens to be a colleague of the book’s principle author F. Bailey Norwood. The irony here is flagrant and infuriating: while accusing activists with sound concerns about Big Ag of incestuous group think, the authors cannot be bothered to cite a source outside of their own collegiate departments.
Had the authors included an actual, robust, scholarly analysis of the issues at hand, these mistakes would prove excusable since a well-reasoned argument would exist beyond the bad faith superficiality of their worst moments. Unfortunately, the majority of the text dabbles in bad faith analysis and two-dimensional pop economics of food that fail to represent, let alone address, the better arguments of food activists. I wasted several hours of my life on this text and wish I could get my time back.
In a chapter on “The GMO Controversy”, the authors explore “both sides” (more on how poorly they execute this stated objective later) of the debate over whether DNA-splicing GMO development presents ethical, commercial, and/or legal risks to the American public. I agree with the authors’ position that today’s GMOs do not fundamentally differ from the GMOs that emerged during the first agricultural revolution. But there are professional, footnoted ways to articulate this point that one would expect of an Oxford University Press volume. Instead, the authors default to a wild series of contradictory and poorly-cited claims about the food industry to justify their essentially libertarian position that GMOs are harmless and regulating them is a waste of time.
In one passage addressing potential loopholes in the FDA regulatory process, for example, the authors assert that “because people working for seed companies are just as ethical as everyone else, it follows that they also work with the FDA because it’s the right thing to do” (p. 63). I am currently studying for the LSAT; to my mind, this sentence could justify at least 3 exam questions about logical fallacies and unsound premises. How naive does one have to be to simply take at face value that a group of people is ethical, let alone “just as ethical as everyone else”? How do we know that presumably ethical people will inherently work with a regulatory agency? What if the agency in question is unethical, thus disincentivizing cooperation with the agency by ethical actors? Does a profit motive not inherently urge against regulatory compliance since regulations mitigate the externalities of unfettered business?
Two pages later, the authors assert that “There are well-qualified dissenting scientists and a motivated group of food activists behind them" (p. 65). The intellectual dishonesty to refer to profit-motivated businesspeople as “ethical” while pointing to activists with no apparent interest other than their own health as “motivated” is astonishing. But the straw-manning gets worse when the authors describe these activists as falling for a “conspiracy theory”. The authors argue as follows: activists whistleblow about the FDA to Big Agriculture pipeline, within which regulators retire from civil service and take cushy jobs in the lucrative food industry that they were charged with regulating only months before. Activists track the individuals who have made this transition and public names of pipeline members online. Activists often point to this Conflict of Interest as reason to distrust the FDA’s neutral position on GMOs (among other issues, which the authors carefully neglect to acnkowledge). Third party regulators agree with the FDA that GMOs are essentially harmless. Therefore, all activists who worry about GMOs and/or about conflicts of interest have gotten caught up in conspiracies.
I happen to agree with the authors that food activists’ concerns about conflicts of interest do not justify a wholehearted rejection of GMOs. It does not follow from the existence of a conflict of interest in Big Ag that the actual entities in conflicted interest - Big Ag and the FDA - are necessarily doing anything harmful. We cannot say for sure that Big Ag is hiding something crucial from regulators about GMOs without evidence of that data itself.
But the conflict of interest created by the FDA to Big Agriculture pipeline is real and terrifying, and it incentivizes conspiratorial thinking by undermining the public’s trust in both regulatory institutions and food companies at large. The authors’ dismissal of these simple facts suggests that they themselves are not neutral actors because they do not accept very real objections to a very real problem in the food industry. This kind of logic offers a template for their argumentation throughout the text: describe a legitimate objection to your food policy position before dismissing it without justification and calling your opponents shrill and uneducated for worrying about nothing-burgers.
Just to demonstrate that I have not fallen prey to conspiratorial thinking myself: a page later, accusations become admission when the authors cite a John Stossel Fox Business interview (no biases there, right?). During this segment, a liberal think-tank policy wonk faces off against, and seems to lose an argument to, OSU professor Jayson Lusky. Dr. Lusky happens to be a colleague of the book’s principle author F. Bailey Norwood. The irony here is flagrant and infuriating: while accusing activists with sound concerns about Big Ag of incestuous group think, the authors cannot be bothered to cite a source outside of their own collegiate departments.
Had the authors included an actual, robust, scholarly analysis of the issues at hand, these mistakes would prove excusable since a well-reasoned argument would exist beyond the bad faith superficiality of their worst moments. Unfortunately, the majority of the text dabbles in bad faith analysis and two-dimensional pop economics of food that fail to represent, let alone address, the better arguments of food activists. I wasted several hours of my life on this text and wish I could get my time back.
December 25, 2022
The book provides a good overview on several food controversies such as pesticides, growth hormones and animal handling. The book presents the main arguments from either side of the debate, for example what animal rights activists dislike about chickens raised in cages vs the view of egg producers. The authors do a great job at pointing out the trade offs between different farming options. They tend to favor conventional farming but they are very transparant about that. I especially like that all views are described in a respectfull manner and much credit is given to the fact that, while it is costly and uncomfortable, a real debate is happening which ultimately leads to improvements in food production.
March 30, 2023
This book was a joke. Worst assigned textbook I’ve ever read. Each chapter was filled to the brim with contradictions and biases, despite the introduction stating that the intent of this book is to explore all sides of agricultural ethical issues. There were some paragraphs I enjoyed, learned, and/or annotated but, as a whole and in terms of academic writing, there are is much better literature out there. It almost felt like this book was written by someone with an agenda *cough, cough, big Ag*.
June 2, 2022
Worth the read to further your understanding of farming. I feel the authors did try to tell “both sides” of a story, but I could see a consistent “lean” to one side, which is super funny because they even acknowledge that people “lean” based on experiences and preferences. Parts seem very credible and parts I seriously raised a brow, I guess that is my own “lean”.
April 30, 2018
science-based, quality information about important food issues
July 29, 2023
此書主要介紹涉及農業與食品安全的各種爭議，作者以中立為名，在農藥、化學肥料、轉基因食品等議題上，羅列正反雙方的立場與觀點，有點令人失望。
November 12, 2016
Any time you try to write a book about controversy, you are asking for... controversy. If you are picking this book up in the first place, you probably have some kind of opinion on food and agriculture. As such, of course there are going to be things you might not agree with in this book. Each chapter was so well researched by the authors (who are all experts in this field) that access to the reference lists alone are worth the price of the text. What I liked the most was how the authors did their best to tie modern hot-button topics into a historical narrative.
I'd especially recommend this book for anyone craving a nuanced-but-short description of food and agricultural issues written by experts, and for anyone wanting to do real research in agriculture (particularly because the references are such solid starting points).
I'd especially recommend this book for anyone craving a nuanced-but-short description of food and agricultural issues written by experts, and for anyone wanting to do real research in agriculture (particularly because the references are such solid starting points).
July 8, 2022
A fairly balanced look at a number of agricultural and food controversies (e.g., pesticides, antibiotics and hormones given to livestock, fertilizers). The authors presented each issue from both ideological sides, although they tended to favor corporate interests. However, this book still gave me quite a bit to think about, and it provided some compelling evidence that challenges or complicates many of the claims made by food activists. Overall, I recommend this to anyone interested in food and agriculture, if only to get a slightly more balanced narrative than what is typical in most publications on the topic.
August 8, 2015
This is a great dive into current food controversies. Is organic food healthier? Are pesticides safe? Although they often conclude that activists concerns are misguided, they are respectful and say debate and skepticism are important in a healthy democracy.
April 25, 2016
My forthcoming research into the many claims of this book will be thorough and well researched, with adequately cited sources - as I would have hoped from such an educated author biography.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews