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.

Plenty: A Memoir of Food and Family

Hannah Howard

A moving reflection on motherhood, friendship, and women making their mark on the world of food from the author of Feast.

Food writer Hannah Howard is at a pivotal moment in her life when she begins searching out her fellow food people—women who’ve carved a place for themselves in a punishing, male-dominated industry. Women whose journeys have inspired and informed Hannah’s own foodie quests. On trips that take her from Milan to Bordeaux to Oslo and then always back again to her home in New York City, Hannah spends time with these influential women, learning about the intimate paths that led them each toward fulfilling careers. Each chef, entrepreneur, barista, cheesemaker, barge captain, and culinary instructor expands our long-held beliefs about how the worldwide network of food professionals and enthusiasts works.

But amid her travels, Hannah finds herself on a heart-wrenching private path. Her plans to embark on motherhood bring her through devastating lows and unimaginable highs. Hannah grapples with personal joy, loss, and a lifelong obsession with food that is laced with insecurity and darker compulsions. Looking to her food heroes for solace, companionship, and inspiration, she discovers new ways to appreciate her body and nourish her life.

At its heart, this lovely and candid memoir explores food as a point of passion and connection and as a powerful way to create community, forge friendships, and make a family.

Feed Us With Trees

Elspeth Hay

A new and ancient story about perennial nut trees, our ecological role as humans, and the future of food.

The day Elspeth Hay learned that we can eat acorns, stories she’d believed her whole life began to unravel.

Until then she’d always believed we must grow our staple foods in farmed fields– the same fields wreaking havoc on our land, air, and water. But all over the Northern Hemisphere, Hay learned, humans once grew our staple foods in forest gardens centered on perennial nut trees: oaks, chestnuts, and hazelnuts. In Feed Us with Trees, Hay brings us along as she gets to know dozens of nut growers, scientists, Indigenous knowledge-keepers, researchers, and food professionals–and discovers that in tending these staple trees, we once played a vital environmental role as one of Earth’s keystone species.

Feed Us with Trees is Hay’s hopeful manifesto about a brighter, more abundant world– and a critical look at the long-held stories we’ll need to rewrite to build it. It will appeal to environmentalists, regenerative farmers, permaculture enthusiasts, agroforesters, locavores, and anyone hungry for a more vibrant future.

Does This Taste Funny?: Recipes Our Family Loves

Stephen Colbert

Stephen and Evie Colbert invite you to pull up a chair as they share their favorite recipes from family and friends and offer a glimpse of food and fun in their South Carolina home.

“Hopefully reading this book and cooking these recipes will feel like hanging out with us at home. We basically live in the kitchen anyway.” ―Evie and Stephen Colbert

As Evie and Stephen explain it, Does This Taste Funny? had its beginnings in the Covid lockdown. “We were all stuck together and couldn’t go out, so we cooked. We had all three kids back under one roof for the first time in a long time, and we had dinner each night as a family. Cooking together became a major source of entertainment.”

Now, the Colberts invite us into their kitchen and around their dining room table. Sharing Stephen and Evie’s favorite recipes, as well as those of their family and friends, this book offers everything from Party Food (called “party food” because “appetizers” implies something to follow when we all know that, often, this is the only course), to Seafood, to Poultry and Meat (“Evie and I have different relationships to meat. I like it. Evie can take it or leave it, and mostly she leaves it.”), to Desserts (“This is one of the largest sections of the book. Evie always reminds me that desserts are a great way to postpone clearing up.”), to Drinks (“I love cocktail hour. It feels like a reward for having gone so long without a cocktail”), all tied together with playful dialogue between Stephen and Evie and gorgeous shots of their food, family, and home.

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.

Barn 8: A Novel

Deb Olin Unferth

An unforgettably exuberant and potent novel by a writer at the height of her powers.

Two auditors for the U.S. egg industry go rogue and conceive a plot to steal a million chickens in the middle of the night—an entire egg farm’s worth of animals. Janey and Cleveland—a spirited former runaway and the officious head of audits—assemble a precarious, quarrelsome team and descend on the farm on a dark spring evening. A series of catastrophes ensues.

Deb Olin Unferth’s wildly inventive novel is a heist story of a very unusual sort. Swirling with a rich array of voices, Barn 8 takes readers into the minds of these renegades: a farmer’s daughter, a former director of undercover investigations, hundreds of activists, a forest ranger who suddenly comes upon forty thousand hens, and a security guard who is left on an empty farm for years. There are glimpses twenty thousand years into the future to see what chickens might evolve into on our contaminated planet. We hear what hens think happens when they die. In the end the cracked hearts of these indelible characters, their earnest efforts to heal themselves, and their radical actions will lead them to ruin or revelation.

Funny, whimsical, philosophical, and heartbreaking, Barn 8 ultimately asks: What constitutes meaningful action in a world so in need of change? Unferth comes at this question with striking ingenuity, razor-sharp wit, and ferocious passion. Barn 8 is a rare comic-political drama, a tour de force for our time.