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Bet The Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food (2012)

by Frederick Kaufman(Favorite Author)

3.44 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0470631929 (ISBN13: 9780470631928)

languge

English

genre

Food & Cookbooks

publisher

Wiley

review 1: Many consumers like myself aren't knowledgable about the mechanism behind the prices of our purchases. Kaufman does an excellent job of revealing to his readers how out food (grain in particular) ends up at the price we find it at. While he does not offer a solid answer to the issue of world hunger or the commodity indexes, the reader is left curious enough to explore further. The only flaw I found with this book is the sole focus on grain. It isn't that huge of a setback but it would have been nice to know the about the machine behind some of our other foods.
review 2: Many non-fiction books present complex and terrifying problems, such as the fact that in a time of record food production, over a billion people are going hungry. Most books then end with a pro... moreposed solution, or a cheery ray of hope for the future. This book does no such thing. The book outlines the sad fact that our entire system of food production has been hijacked by a complex high-finance system of commodity indexes, speculation and derivatives. The problem with such a system is that by making money off speculative food prices and futures (theoretical crops), the real-life poor suffer while the real-life rich prosper. The gap widens and because these "derivatives" are just numbers on a screen, no one knows or cares that they are having a direct impact on a family that can no longer feed itself due to a quadruple-price increase in the price of wheat. Much like all of the economic mayhem of the last few years, the culprit is greed, pure and simple. But there's no pure and simple solution to that problem.Why don't I read mindless fiction?? less

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