Category: Reviews

If you think you know Monsanto — the biochemical company that has become synonymous with genetically modified monoculture and toxic herbicides — think again. Bartow J. Elmore’s “Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and Our Food Future” is a history of the corporation, its blunders and how it became the black hat of modern agriculture. Elmore’s detailed

Assembled around five back-to-the-land movements from the 1840s into the 2010s and the pandemic years, “Foodtopia” is an exploration of utopian experiments that use food as a means to create a more just and equal world. Woven together with the common thread of food as a means to a better reality, Kelley presents the reader

Juliet Blankespoor first made a name for herself within the herbal community in founding the Chestnut School of Herbal Medicine in Asheville, North Carolina, a formerly in-person school that now exists fully online. She wrote a multifarious blog for many years, but “The Healing Garden: Cultivating & Handcrafting Herbal Remedies” is her first book. This

The secret to a healthy garden begins with the soil. “There are no short cuts,” writes Sally Morgan, who warns that it takes time to build healthy soil. But don’t worry, Morgan shows how gardeners can work with nature to build their soil, grow healthy plants and decrease the populations of pests and diseases. And

“Sandor Katz’s Fermentation Journeys” brings us around the world, from the tropics to the Arctic, where the bestselling author’s notoriety leads him down back paths and opens doors to places, people and fermenting practices that most travelers do not get to experience. Reading this book filled me with a strong sense of interconnectedness, bringing to

“Toxic Legacy” isn’t Stephen King’s latest bestseller, but it may keep you up at night. Though complex at times, this biochemical treatise is convincing that glyphosate, an active ingredient in most Roundup herbicides, is poisoning all of us right this very second. Stephanie Seneff is a somewhat unconventional voice on the topic of toxicity. She

“Let’s have tea. Let’s have galaxies, let’s have earthworms, let’s have sorrow and tenderness, and let us pour and receive the bottomless mercy that life has for us in our forgiveness, our failures, our longings. In return, let us forgive the world for being the world, let us allow all things to be forgiven, to

Solid municipal waste, much of which is composed of plastic, is on the rise across the globe. Estimates indicate that since the mid-1900s, humans have produced over 8.3 billion metric tons of non-recycled petrochemical-based plastic. Worse still, 76% of that plastic is believed to have been used only once or twice before being discarded. In

“The Ecological Gardener” is a great book for anyone who wants to think beyond the vegetable patch, beyond the flower beds and the mowed lawn. Matt Rees-Warren encourages gardeners to embrace the larger landscape and reimagine how our gardening might help mitigate climate change. Is it possible to do that? To reduce carbon one compost

Corn isn’t typically considered a charismatic crop. For many, it invokes images of Midwestern monoculture, starchy syrups and corn on the cob.  As “Endangered Maize” establishes, though, the efforts to preserve the biodiversity of corn over the last two centuries tells a familiar story about modern agriculture: crop diversity has shrunk in the face of