Foreword
Some people spend way too much time thinking about food. You know the type: a dozen kinds of olive oil in the kitchen cupboard, cranky when the goat cheese isn’t served at room temperature, fond of restaurants that serve chocolate-covered edamame. When foodies and gourmands start talking about their latest culinary obsession, I look for the nearest exit. But most people don’t spend enough time thinking about food, at least not in a meaningful way. They may worry about calories and carbs, and yet miss the real point. What we eat has changed more during the past thirty years than in the previous thirty thousand. Transfats, genetically engineered soybeans, livestock pumped with growth hormones and fed slaughterhouse waste, Chicken McNuggets–nobody’s ever eaten this stuff before. We’ve become a nation of guinea pigs, the subjects in a vast scientific experiment, waiting to see what happens when human beings eat too much industrialized food. Much of it tastes and smells pretty good. The pleasure, however, doesn’t last long. Learning where our modern mcfood comes from and how it’s made and what it’s doing to the world leaves a bitter aftertaste.
Those are some of the reasons you should read this book. The authors don’t want to lecture you or browbeat you into politically correct dining. They just want you to know what’s wrong with our current food system and how easily it can be made right. They provide the basic information about how to eat in way that’s not only sustainable for the environment, but also for your body. The recipes here aren’t too precious or fancy. I like the idea of food that’s guilt-free and tastes good. The word Grub really says it all.
After this book appears, lobbyists for the fast food and meatpacking industries will probably accuse Bryant Terry and Anna Lappé of being “Food Nazis”. That’s one more reason to read their work. Bryant has spent years helping inner city kids make the connection between a poor diet and poor health. Anna has been challenging the logic of industrialized agriculture since practically the day she was born. It makes perfect sense, in this age of doublespeak and disinformation, that they would be compared to Nazis. Meanwhile, the handful of corporations that control our food supply are wiping out small businesses, driving independent farmers and ranchers off the land, spending billions of dollars on deceptive mass marketing, pushing for everything everywhere to be the same, and attacking anyone who challenges their unusual version of the “free” market. The authors of this book may be passionate and committed, but if you’re looking for the totalitarian impulse in America, just head for the nearest drive-through. The fast food giants are becoming obsolete, and they know it. They’re like angry, dying beasts lashing out. The twenty-first century doesn’t belong to them. Now’s the time for some grub.
-Eric Schlosser
