Skip to main content

(A kind of) Review: Not On the Label by Felicity Lawrence

Genre: Food writing.
Reading challenge:  The 2016 Nonfiction Reading Challenge, hosted by The Introverted Reader
Challenge tally: 4 books.

I love to read food books, both foodie memoirs and cookbooks, but this is a different kind of food book - one designed to inform and make you think about what you eat and how you shop for it.

The subtitle of this book is "What really goes into the food on your plate". It might lead you to believe that it's all about food additives and such (they are mentioned occasionally, and discussed - stomach churningly - in some detail in the last chapter) but it is actually an investigation of the whole system of mass food production, from crop to factory to distributors to shop to consumer, with a focus on intensively grown/farmed foods like vegetables, fruit, coffee, chicken and shrimp.

The situation Lawrence describes is that of the UK, but much of it is valid for any western country, and I have no doubt it is at least partially true for Iceland. I know I will not look at chicken, salads and apples the same way again after reading this book, nor at supermarket chains and processed food.

Lawrence describes wide-spread human rights abuses in the food industry, dubious, unethical and sometimes downright crooked food production practices (additives are only part of it), how food retailers have a stranglehold on food distributors who in turn have a stranglehold on food producers who have a power of almost life and death over the itinerant workers they need to harvest and sometimes process their products, and practices by the world's largest food producers that have a huge negative impact on the lives of farmers in poor countries.

It's all anger-inducing, and one feels helpless in the face of such entrenched and widespread bad practices, but in the afterword she does offer some ways in which ordinary people can try to work against the systematic abuses detailed in the book, such as buying organic - not from supermarkets - buying fair trade - again, not from supermarkets - and buying local.

Would I read it again? No, I don't think so, but I would definitely read a more recent book on the same subjects, to find out if there have been any developments since Lawrence was researching this subject.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down
Post a Comment
Read more

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout  woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went and
Post a Comment
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove
Post a Comment
Read more