The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos

Mark Easter

The Blue Plate is the perfect dinner companion for food lovers who also care about the planet.

Ecologist Mark Easter offers a detailed picture of the impact the foods you love have on the earth. Organized by the ingredients of a typical dinner party, including seafood, salad, bread, chicken, steak, potatoes, and fruit pie with ice cream, each chapter examines the food through the lens of the climate crisis. Not a cookbook, but instead, gathered like guests around the table, you will find the stories of these foods: The soil that grew the lettuce; the farmers, ranchers and orchardists who steward the land; the grocers and workers at dairies and farms who labor to bring food to the table. Each chapter reveals the causes and effects of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the social and environmental impacts of the demand for out-of-season and far-from-home foods.

What can you do to eat more sustainably? Food lovers everywhere will be happy to know that the answer is not necessarily a plant-based diet. For each food group, Easter offers not recipes but low-carbon, in-season alternatives that make your favorite foods not only more sustainable but also more delicious.

The first step, however, is an understanding of how food is grown, produced, harvested, and shipped. In stories both personal and entertaining, the author offers a full understanding of what’s for dinner.

A Good Drink: In Pursuit of Sustainable Spirits

Shanna Farrell

“Insightful tour de force… Farrell’s writing is as informative as it is intoxicating” — Publishers Weekly

Shanna Farrell loves a good drink. As a bartender, she not only poured spirits, but learned their stories–who made them and how. Living in San Francisco, surrounded by farm-to-table restaurants and high-end bars, she wondered why the eco-consciousness devoted to food didn’t extend to drinks.

The short answer is that we don’t think of spirits as food. But whether it’s rum, brandy, whiskey, or tequila, drinks are distilled from the same crops that end up on our tables. Most are grown with chemicals that cause pesticide resistance and pollute waterways, and distilling itself requires huge volumes of water. Even bars are notorious for generating mountains of trash. The good news is that while the good drink movement is far behind the good food movement, it is emerging.

In A Good Drink, Farrell goes in search of the bars, distillers, and farmers who are driving a transformation to sustainable spirits. She meets mezcaleros in Guadalajara who are working to preserve traditional ways of producing mezcal, for the health of the local land, the wallets of the local farmers, and the culture of the community. She visits distillers in South Carolina who are bringing a rare variety of corn back from near extinction to make one of the most sought-after bourbons in the world. She meets a London bar owner who has eliminated individual bottles and ice, acculturating drinkers to a new definition of luxury.

These individuals are part of a growing trend to recognize spirits for what they are–part of our food system. For readers who have ever wondered who grew the pears that went into their brandy or why their cocktail is an unnatural shade of red, A Good Drink will be an eye-opening tour of the spirits industry. For anyone who cares about the future of the planet, it offers a hopeful vision of change, one pour at a time.

The Slow Food Story

Geoff Andrews

The Slow Food movement was established in Italy as a response to the dominance of fast food chains, supermarkets, and large-scale agribusiness. Defending “the universal right to pleasure,” it promotes food production and consumption based on “good, clean, and fair” local products.

In twenty years Slow Food has grown into an international organisation with more than 80,000 members in over 100 countries. With roots in the 1960s and 1970s counter-culture, Slow Food’s distinctive politics link gastronomic pleasure and environmental responsibility. The movement crosses the left-right divide to embrace both the conservative desire to preserve traditional rural communities and an alternative “virtuous” idea of globalisation.

In the first in-depth study of the fascinating politics of Slow Food, Geoff Andrews shows that the alternative future it offers can be extended to all aspects of modern life. The Slow Food Story is an extensive critique of the fast-moving, work-obsessed contemporary capitalist culture.

Your Table Is Ready: Tales of a New York City Maître D’

Michael Cecchi-Azzolina

A front-of-the-house Kitchen Confidential from a career maître d’hotel who manned the front of the room in New York City’s hottest and most in-demand restaurants.

From the glamorous to the entitled, from royalty to the financially ruined, everyone who wanted to be seen—or just to gawk—at the hottest restaurants in New York City came to places Michael Cecchi-Azzolina helped run. His phone number was passed around among those who wanted to curry favor, during the decades when restaurants replaced clubs and theater as, well, theater in the most visible, vibrant city in the world.

Besides dropping us back into a vanished time, Your Table Is Ready takes us places we’d never be able to get into on our own: Raoul’s in Soho with its louche club vibe; Buzzy O’Keefe’s casually elegant River Café (the only outer-borough establishment desirable enough to be included in this roster), from Keith McNally’s Minetta Tavern to Nolita’s Le Coucou, possibly the most beautiful room in New York City in 2018, with its French Country Auberge-meets-winery look and the most exquisite and enormous stands of flowers, changed every three days.

From his early career serving theater stars like Tennessee Williams and Dustin Hoffman at La Rousse right through to the last pre-pandemic-shutdown full houses at Le Coucou, Cecchi-Azzolina has seen it all. In Your Table Is Ready, he breaks down how restaurants really run (and don’t), and how the economics work for owners and overworked staff alike. The professionals who gravitate to the business are a special, tougher breed, practiced in dealing with the demanding patrons and with each other, in a very distinctive ecosystem that’s somewhere between a George Orwell “down and out in….” dungeon and a sleek showman’s smoke-and-mirrors palace.

Your Table Is Ready is a rollicking, raunchy, revelatory memoir.

Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

Anthony Bourdain

A lot has changed since Kitchen Confidential. For the subculture of chefs and cooks, for the restaurant business as a whole—and for Anthony Bourdain. Medium Raw explores those changes, taking the reader back and forth—from the author’s bad old days—to the present. Tracking his own strange and unexpected voyage from journeyman cook to globe travelling professional eater and drinker, Bourdain compares and contrasts what he’s seen and what he’s seeing, pausing along the way for a series of confessions, rants, investigations, and interrogations of some of the more controversial figures in food. Always returning to the question: “Why cook? “ Or the harder to answer: “Why cook well?”

Beginning with a secret and highly illegal after-hours gathering of powerful chefs he compares to a Mafia summit, the story follows the twists and eddies through subjects ranging from:

• “The Friends of David Chang” an incredibly undiplomatic discussion with (and peek into the mind of) the hottest, most influential chef in America.
• “Don’t Ask Alice”: Alice Waters. Good . . . or Evil?
• The Big Shake Out: The restaurant business in post economic meltdown America. How it’s changing. How it might change even more.
• And, Heroes and Villains. (With a few returning favorites.)

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

Benjamin Lorr

In the tradition of Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, an extraordinary investigation into the human lives at the heart of the American grocery store

What does it take to run the American supermarket? How do products get to shelves? Who sets the price? And who suffers the consequences of increased convenience end efficiency? In this alarming exposé, author Benjamin Lorr pulls back the curtain on this highly secretive industry. Combining deep sourcing, immersive reporting, and compulsively readable prose, Lorr leads a wild investigation in which we learn:

• The secrets of Trader Joe’s success from Trader Joe himself
• Why truckers call their job “sharecropping on wheels”
• What it takes for a product to earn certification labels like “organic” and “fair trade”
• The struggles entrepreneurs face as they fight for shelf space, including essential tips, tricks, and traps for any new food business
• The truth behind the alarming slave trade in the shrimp industry

The result is a page-turning portrait of an industry in flux, filled with the passion, ingenuity, and exploitation required to make this everyday miracle continue to function. The product of five years of research and hundreds of interviews across every level of the industry, The Secret Life of Groceries delivers powerful social commentary on the inherently American quest for more and the social costs therein.

Soul Food

Adrian Miller

Finalist for the 2020 IACP Award for Best Cookbook, Food Issues & Matters

In this insightful and eclectic history, Adrian Miller delves into the influences, ingredients, and innovations that make up the soul food tradition. Focusing each chapter on the culinary and social history of one dish–such as fried chicken, chitlins, yams, greens, and red drinks–Miller uncovers how it got on the soul food plate and what it means for African American culture and identity.

Miller argues that the story is more complex and surprising than commonly thought. Four centuries in the making, and fusing European, Native American, and West African cuisines, soul food–in all its fried, pork-infused, and sugary glory–is but one aspect of African American culinary heritage. Miller discusses how soul food has become incorporated into American culture and explores its connections to identity politics, bad health raps, and healthier alternatives. This refreshing look at one of America’s most celebrated, mythologized, and maligned cuisines is enriched by spirited sidebars, photographs, and twenty-two recipes.

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical, as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings—asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass—offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.

Grilled: Turning Adversaries Into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry

Leah Garcés

This is the story of Leah Garcés’s fight for better treatment of farmed animals, as she works with farmers, suppliers and restaurant chains to end factory farming for good.

Leah Garcés has committed her career to fighting for the rights of the animals that end up on our plates. As President of the nonprofit group Mercy for Animals and former US Executive Director of Compassion in World Farming, she has led the fight against the sprawling chicken industry that raises billions of birds in cruel conditions–all to satisfy the American appetite for meat.

Grilled: Turning Adversaries into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry is her story of working alongside the food and farming industry for animal welfare and ethical food. Instead of fighting and protesting and shaming–approaches that simply haven’t worked previously–Garcés has instead gotten to know the producers. She has worked alongside owners of the megafarms, befriending them, having frank conversations with them, and ultimately encouraging change through dialogue and discussion. Leah is changing the way America farms her animals through this bold approach, and is helping to directly improve the lives of millions of farmed animals.

When she started her journey, Leah did not have much empathy to spare for the chicken-contract farmer–until she actually met one and tried to understand the difficulties they faced. This is the story of what happens when we cross enemy lines to look for solutions. It’s a story of giving in to discomfort for the sake of progress. It’s a story of the power of human connection, and what happens when we practice empathy toward our enemies.

The Perfect Meal

John Baxter

John Baxter’s The Perfect Meal is part grand tour of France, part history of French cuisine, taking readers on a journey to discover and savor some of the world’s great cultural achievements before they disappear completely.

Some of the most revered and complex elements of French cuisine are in danger of disappearing as old ways of agriculture, butchering, and cooking fade and are forgotten. In this charming culinary travel memoir, John Baxter follows up his bestselling The Most Beautiful Walk in the World by taking his readers on the hunt for some of the most delicious and bizarre endangered foods of France.

The Perfect Meal: In Search of the Lost Tastes of France is the perfect read for foodies and Francophiles, cooks and gastronomists, and fans of food culture.