Chew On This by Eric Schlosser & Charles Wilson

In this book you will learn things that you never knew about food. For example you learn about the fifteen year old who invented the hamburger. You will see how French fries are often shot through a superpowerd gun-and what makes them taste so good. As well as learning the secret ingredient that makes your drink pink and a special ingredient often found in meat. You will explore the six weeks that a fast food chicken lives before it becomes a chicken nugget. Examine a table of healthy and unhealthy human body parts- and see what happens inside your body when you eat too much junk. This book is an eye opener to what we are really eating outside.

Excerpt: the story of fast food begins in October 1885, near the small town of Seymour, Wisconsin. A Friendly and outgoing fifteen-year-old boy named Charllie Nagreen was driving his family’s ox cart down a dirt road amid wide-open fields. Charlie was going to Outagamie County’s first annual fair, where he wanted to earn some extra money selling meatballs. What happened next was the unlikely origin of a delicious sandwich that would one day change the world. As Charlie sold meatballs at the fair, he noticed that customers had trouble eating them and strolling at the same time. People were impatient. They wanted to visit Mr. John Bull popular beehives(encased in glass), to see fancy new harvesting machines, and to enjoy all the other thrilling attraction at the fair. they didn’t want to waste time eating meatballs put them between two slices of bread, people could walk and eat. And so Charlie invented the hamburger.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

Today, buffeted by one food fad after another, America is suffering from what can only be described as a national eating disorder. Will it be fast food tonight, or something organic? Or perhaps something organic? Or perhaps something we few ourselves? The question of what to have for dinner has confronted us since man discovered fire. But as Micheal Pollan explains in this revolutionary book, how we answer it now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may determine our survival as a species. Packed with profound surprises, The Omnivore’s Dilemma is changing the way Americans think about the politics, perils and pleasures of eating.

Excerpt: Air-conditioned, odorless, illuminated by buzzing fluorescent tubes, the American supermarket doesn’t present itself as having very much to do with Nature. And yet what is this place if not a landscape (man-made), it’s true) teeming with plants and animals? I’m not just talking about the produce section or meat counter, either-the supermarket’s flora and fauna. Ecologically speaking, these are this landscape’s most legible zones, the places where it doesn’t take a field guide to identify the resident species. Over there’s your eggplant, onion, potato, and leek; your apple, banana and orange. Spritzed with morning dew every few minutes, Produce is only corner of the supermarket where we’re apt to think “Ah, yes, the bounty of Nature!” which probably explains why such a garden of fruits and vegetables (sometimes flowers too) is what usually greets the shopper coming through the automatic doors.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

What happens to a field of potatoes destined to become French fries?  In how many disguises does corn sneak into your food (hint: it’s in your soda, burger and dessert).  Where did the chicken in your nugget grow up?  In this book, you’ll learn a lot more about where your food comes from that you ever wanted to know.  Did you know that most farmers can’t afford to NOT grown corn?  What’s the link between obesity and high fructose corn syrup?  And why do  we feed the parts of dead animals to cows we are going to slaughter and eat?  While y9ou’re learning about how food gets to your table, you will also be introduced to important scientific concepts, like natural selection and the nitrogen cycle.  So you can become smarter and healthier just from reading one book!

 

Excerpt:

Corn isn’t the only thing that cattle are fed.  You might be as shocked as I was to learn that they are also fed parts of other cattle.  That’s right, these herbivores, natural plant eaters, are fed meat.  For years, leftover beef scraps were ground up and put into cattle feed.  After all, it was protein and cattle need protein to grow.  Then people in England began dying of a sickness called mad Cow disease, that is always fatal.  It is spread by eating the brains of infected animals.  Some feedlots still permit the feeding to cattle protein to other animals.  Feather meal and chicken litter (that is, bedding feces and discarded bits of feed from chicken farms) are accepted cattle feeds.  Some experts worry that other diseases like mad cow could start to appear because of this practice.