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Cook for Good Library: Good Reads about Cooking and Food

Here are some of my favorite cookbooks and books about food politics. If you click on title, you'll be taken to the IndyBound site, which will help you buy a book at your local independent bookstore.

Please buy from your independent bookstores. They are vital to finding new authors, keeping a strong selection of books available, and warding off censorship. This censorship can be an active attempt to shut down particular messages or simply a side-effect of only selling books that are most likely to sell the best nationwide. If you buy on a click-through from this page, you'll also be supporting Cook for Good and getting a big thanks from me, since a small commission comes back to me from every sale on the site, at no additional cost to you.

Food, Inc.: How Industrial Food Is Making Us Sicker, Fatter, and Poorer - And What You Can Do about It: A Participant Guide

Frankly, I looked at this book with trepidation for several days after I bought it. Would it be another gory trip through veal cages and slaughter houses? I'm relieved to report that it's mostly quite the opposite: an uplifting guide to current issues in our food systems and what you can do to improve them. If you read only one book on food issues this year, Food, Inc. would be a great choice. The book contains three sets of essays: one on making the Food, Inc. documentary film, another on issues within the food wars, and finally one on actions you can take. Within these sections, each longer essay is paired with a shorter one which presents another view or more details. This structure lets you hear from many experts and perspectives. It also lets you easily delay the "Worst Animal Practices" essay until after breakfast in favor of the uplifting "Produce to the People." Special note: hope you can join us at the special showing of the documentary Food, Inc. that will be a Cook for Good Foodraiser for the Inter-Faith Food Shuttle.

Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating with More Than 75 Recipes

Mark Bittman's casual, funny, you-can-do-it style will give you courage in the kitchen to make simple, tasty food. Food Matters is a break from his usual cookbooks or the Minimalist columns in the New York Times. Here, Bittman spends about half the book making a convincing argument that you can vote with your fork by choosing foods that will slow global warming, minimize animal suffering, improve your health, help you lose weight, and be delicious. He also gives a brief history of the forces at work against you doing this, including Big Ag and even our own USDA. Bittman's plan, supported by example menus and recipes, calls for you to go vegan before 6. That is, fill up and even splurge on plants before dinner, then eat a broader ranger of food, including dairy products and meat if you'd like. Food Matters will be especially helpful to people who are convinced they need to change their eating habits but need some friendly motivation and a manageable set of recipes. Bittman uses a broader range of ingredients than you'll find in the Cook for Good recipes, including some meat and more expensive or exotic ingredients.

How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Simple Meatless Recipes for Great Food

As Mark Bittman says about meat in Food Matters, "If you hate factory farming (and you should), your primary concern should be reducing consumption." If you already agree with this statement, then you can skip Food Matters and move right on to How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. This would be my desert-island cookbook, the one I would take if I could have only one cookbook. Bittman's introductions to various foods and techniques will cause you to look at even onions and stir-fries with a fresh understanding. He really shines with his brief, crystal clear directions and variations on each dish which makes this 996-page book even more full of recipes than its shear heft would indicate.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

If you're thinking about becoming more of a locavore and want to know what it's like at the extreme end, look no further than Barbara Kingsolver's lyrical Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Kingsolver's excellent novels and science essays have given her readers a desire to know more about the real Barbara Kingsolver. This book delivers with an intimate description of her family's year of growing, raising, and eating only local food. Share the joy of raising chickens, making cheese, and even witnessing heirloom turkey sex! The book itself is a family affair, with Kingsolver's husband's short pieces about industrial agriculture and her oldest daughter Camille's recipes at the end of every chapter. You can cook along with the family and the seasons, but this is primarily a page-turner of a memoir.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Michael Pollan asked a simple question and triggered the wave of food books and activism that led to Food, Inc. He wanted to know what should omnivores eat, since they can eat everything. He answers this question by looking at four meals, starting with a corn-based, fast-food one and ending with a meal from food he grows, gathers, hunts, and cooks himself. Along the way, he introduces you to disturbing industrial meat practices and an inspiring, integrated farm that uses a complex dance of interdependence to optimize the productivity and comfort of a sustainable troupe of cows, chickens, pigs, and plants. The Omnivore's Dilemma reads like an adventure novel with a scientist hero, with the author embedded in the food systems from the industrial to the primitive.

Thank You for Smoking

What is a comic novel about the tobacco industry doing in the company of all these food books? Thank You for Smoking is a devastatingly funny evisceration of a tobacco lobbyist and the other self-proclaimed Merchants of Death that he pals around with: the lobbyists for the firearms and alcohol industries. Reading this book will not only make you laugh so hard you'll cry, it will also help you decode the statements from Big Ag about Food, Inc. and other criticism of industrial agriculture. When the smokesman, that is, spokesman for the National Chicken Council attacks Michael Pollan for his "exquisitely refined political and gastronomical sensibilities" and postulates that "we’re moving toward a world where the only really refined cuisine will be turnips, pulled from our own gardens in front of our dinner guests and cooked on the spot in butter churned at home earlier that day," you can smell a kindred spirit to Thank You For Smoking's evil PR genius Nick Naylor.

Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian

Before Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian came along, World Vegetarian was my go-to book for daily cooking and for presents to those setting up a new kitchen. It would still be one of the books I'd take to a desert island.

Jaffrey's brilliant concept was to search out and clearly describe vegetarian home cooking around the globe. You won't find trendy or fussy food here burdened with faux meat and garish garnishes. Instead, you'll find the international equivalent of the church-ladies cookbooks. This is how mama cooks around the globe.

I've grow so confident in these recipes that I often try new ones for company without fearing a flop. World Vegetarian provides a great balance of the exotic and the comforting.

How Hungry is America?

Here's a no-holds-barred look at who has been hungry in America, who is hungry now, and why. The chapter "A Short History of Domestic Hunger" provided thought-provoking context for our current situation, which is much better than it was a century ago but worse than it was during the 1970s. Other chapters hammer home the damage that individuals' hunger does to society as a whole and the problem with relying on charities. The key "secular parable" in the book asks whether, if your house were on fire, you'd want to rely on a volunteer bucket brigade or a trained, well-equipped, and well-coordinated professional fire department.

This book seethes with research, passion, and personal experience. Berg even has a chapter taking the food-stamp challenge for a week. Like so many of these challenges, his experiment was too short for even mini-bulk buying and he had a vested interest in proving it was difficult. I'm sure it was as miserable as he described, but most of those problems could be addressed by having even two weeks' worth of food money and cooking the Cook for Good way. But don't let this quibble keep you from this fascinating and useful book. It will help you think clearly about the reality of hunger in America and work effectively towards ending it.