Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do about It

Thanks to the efforts of Al Gore, most people are aware of their carbon footprint and ways that they can reduce the size of their footprint. But how many of us know that we also have a “foodprint”? Anna Lappé introduces us to this important concept in her book, Diet for a Hot Planet.

Thanks to the factory farming of crops and animals, the very food we eat is contributing to the problem of global warming. The production of chemical fertilizers and pesticides fill the air with greenhouse gases. The resulting degradation of topsoil from the use of chemical fertilizers not only decreases the soil’s ability to store carbon, but also releases the carbon formerly stored in soils into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide.

And then there is livestock. Livestock which is fed the majority of the corn and soy beans raised in a miasma of chemicals. Livestock which produces waste in such quantity that it has to be stored in manure lagoons which leach into the soil and foul the groundwater, or flooded out in storms, pollute the surrounding countryside.

The most frightening statistic in the book is that ruminants (livestock that eats grass such as cows) produce 27% of methane emitted globally. Methane is a more dangerous greenhouse gas than the carbon dioxide that we are all so fixated on. Factory farming of livestock produces more greenhouse gases than all of the cars, trucks, buses, trains and planes together in the entire world.

Having made her argument about the deadly cost to the environment of factory farms, Ms Lappé offers a solution. She introduces us to New Forest Farm, an organic farm that practices mixed agriculture where diverse crops are grown together in the same fields as opposed to the monoculture favored by factory farms. Mixed agriculture keeps the soil and the farmer’s pocketbook healthy. If one crop fails or underproduces, other crops grown in the same fields continue to produce both a harvest and an income stream, while enriching and replenishing the soil.

This is the one part of the book that I found disappointing. Ms. Lappé gives the impression that the concept of mixed agriculture is a new and extraordinary idea. It is, in fact, a very ancient idea. Native Americans practiced this kind of agriculture for thousands of years before their way of life was wiped out by Europeans. Think “Three Sisters” (corn, squash and beans) in North America. In Central America, it is known as “milpa” and still practiced in some areas. Farmers plant a dozen different crops together in the same fields. Some milpa fields have stayed fertile for over four thousand years.

Ms. Lappé then addresses the argument that organic farming is not as productive as factory farming. She rightly points out that organic farming is more productive. Then she goes on to discuss the dangers of genetically modified plants. I was impressed by her calm, matter of fact tone on this hot button topic. So many authors, both for and against GMOs (genetically modified organisms), tend to get a little shrill when discussing their views.

The last part of her book is the most valuable. She gives her readers, no matter where they live in the USA, the resources and tools they need to reduce the size of their own and their communities’ “foodprint”. She impressed me once more with the realistic solutions she offers and the level of detail, depending on how involved people would like to be in the process. Books on climate change tend to either offer sweeping generalizations or solutions that are too impractical for the typical man (or woman) on the street.

Review copy courtesy of Bloomsbury USA

The Healing Powers of Chocolate

I have to admit that I didn’t finish reading this book. I made it to page 167 of 294 (the last 60 of those pages are recipes and places to buy chocolate). It is so poorly written that I just couldn’t read it. My initial impression was that it needed a good editor, but after the first couple of chapters, I realized that what it really needed was a good author.

There is very little original writing in this volume. Most of the material in it was previously published in Ms. Orey’s previous two books. It is obvious she merely copied and pasted passages from those books into the manuscript with no regard to narrative flow.

She uses tables of information lifted directly from other sources (with proper attribution) without any discussion. The most egregious fault I found was her description of a tour of a chocolate factory. She was unable to make the tour, so she used the notes of a friend who did go on the tour. Just the notes in raw form, again copied and pasted into her manuscript.

Some of her writing reads likes notes also. I found it very jarring to encounter sentences that were grammatically incorrect or that had no point. She tells the same stories over and over, each time as if it were the first time that the story has been used.

Her tracing of the history of chocolate is marred by her lack of geographical knowledge. Countries wander from Central to South America and back again, depending on which page you are reading.

As for those “healing powers”, she is correct in citing the trace nutrients found in chocolate. However, reputable scientists have pointed out that they are found in such minute quantities that you would have to eat 25 pounds of chocolate every day to gain any benefit from them. Ms. Orley smoothly skates past this little detail by recommending a “dosage” of 1 to 2 squares of dark chocolate per day as part of a healthy diet (she recommends either the Mediterranean diet or the French diet) along with regular exercise. She neglects to mention that it is the diet and exercise, not the chocolate, that is providing the health benefits.

She lives in the San Francisco area and takes us on a tour of the chocolatiers in that city, breathlessly describing their incomparable chocolates, recommending that readers choose those chocolates rather than chocolates from anywhere else. She then goes on to admit that she eats plain old Hershey’s Dark Chocolate. From Pennsylvania.

Review copy courtesy of Kensington Books