FORMERLY KNOWN AS FOOD
How the Industrial Food System is Changing Our Minds, Bodies, and Culture
by Kristin Lawless
If you think buying organic from Whole Foods is protecting you, you're wrong. Our food―even what we're told is good for us―has changed for the worse in the past 100 years, its nutritional content deteriorating due to industrial farming and its composition altered due to the addition of thousands of chemicals from pesticides to packaging. We simply no longer know what we’re eating.
In FORMERLY KNOWN AS FOOD: How the Industrial Food System is Changing Our Minds, Bodies, and Culture (St. Martin’s Press; June 19, 2018; $26.99 hardcover) independent journalist and nutrition expert Kristin Lawless exposes how the billion-dollar food industry is shaping our food preferences, altering our brains, changing the composition of our microbiota, and even affecting the expression of our genes. As a result, our bodies are literally changing from the inside out.
After years of "eat this, not that" advice from doctors, journalists, and food faddists, FORMERLY KNOWN AS FOOD offers something completely different—a comprehensive explanation of the problem―going beyond nutrition to issues of food choice, class, race, and gender.
Lawless details how Big Food uses racial and class divisions to foster loyalty to brands and capitalize on gender divisions to undermine the valuable skills of cooking and preparing food in the home. She also argues that the tactics of the “food movement” have failed to bring about real change often echoing the food industry itself with calls for making better individual choices.
Instead of relying on consumer choice alone, Lawless shows how actual change will come through first understanding the issues and then demanding action. She takes to task the federal agencies—the FDA and EPA—that are supposed to be protecting the public health but instead are protecting industry profits. As a result, we are all exposed to an array of unregulated environmental chemicals every day—some of them endocrine disruptors, which are causing alarming and irreversible health effects.
Lawless also reports on how the industrial food system has caused the extinction of some important bacterial species of the microbiota and highlights a new and important finding about the role of one strain that is crucial to the health of babies—and our long-term health.
She provides practical tips for the individual too, with a sound and simple philosophy of eating, the “Whole Egg Theory” or the idea that only whole and intact foods—like the whole egg—should be part of your diet. More broadly Lawless proposes new and bold ideas for creating real change through collective action and innovative new programs, ending with a manifesto for a new, politicized food movement.
Destined to set the debate over food politics for the next decade, FORMERLY KNOWN AS FOOD speaks to a new generation looking for a different conversation about the food on our plates.
Kristin Lawless is the author of Formerly Known As Food: How the Industrial Food System Is Changing Our Minds, Bodies, and Culture, which was the winner of the Green Prize for Sustainable Literature in 2019. Her journalism and columns have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Newsweek, and VICE, as well as in academic journals, such as The Black Scholar, Critical Quarterly, and The New Labor Forum.
