Feeding the Future
Restoring the Planet and Healing Ourselves
The convoluted web of food system sustainability, land management, and ecological misfires populates the pages of Nicole Negowetti’s Feeding the Future.
The apparatus of food production is herein magnified through dense, research-based pleas, warning of the harm caused by industrial agriculture across centuries of human intrusion. Indigenous traditions of crop rotation, intercropping, and regenerative soil and water management are pitted against the short-sightedness of yield as the only paradigm for food productivity. Highlighting insufficiencies in balancing greenhouse gas emissions and protecting biodiversity, the book focuses on the problem of short-term goal setting, doubling down on the misguided notion of human separation from the rest of nature, which results in entitlement to dominate and pound the earth to submission.
The book is written with an activist’s eye, ensuring that strong foundations for inciting change are evident throughout each chapter. Negowetti relates bold stances to curtail generalities around the system’s cracks. “This is not a system in crisis,” she writes, “it’s a system in extraction. The foundational architecture of capitalism shapes every aspect of the industrial food system.”
Relayed with a sense of urgency and wisdom, the book utilizes insights from a bevy of regenerative-minded groups to question narratives about agriculture, food justice, and the technology of food production. A balance is struck between the casting of blame for the current reality and recognizing the future, where agroecology, biocultural history, and regenerative ecosystem studies frame the world as a symbiosis of civilization’s sustenance demands and its invisible commune with nature.
Feeding the Future is an academic dissertation on the catastrophic damage of industrialized farming and an informed appeal to right the situation before it’s too late.
Reviewed by
Ryan Prado
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
