Recommended Reading: 7 Longreads on What We’re Doing to Food & What Food Is Doing to Us

• Modern Industrial Foods & Their Effects on the Human Body
  What’s modern farming doing to our food? This recent article from the Natural Medicine Journal explores the health impact of modern interventions commonly used in the food industry – GM crops, pesticides, drugs, additives – and the benefits of opting for organic.
• Junk Food Is Bad for Plants, Too
  From Nautilus, more about industrial agriculture’s impact on the quality of the food it produces – how the trade-off for high yield is a lower nutritional profile.
• The Sugar Conspiracy
  Before there was Robert Lustig, there was John Yudkin and his message of the damage that refined sugar does to the human body. This excellent article from the Guardian tells the history of sugar science and how so many of “the world’s top nutrition scientists got it so wrong for so long.”
• How the Western Diet Has Derailed Our Evolution
  Another smart piece from Nautilis – this, on how the standard American diet has wreaked havoc on the human microbiome and what that means for the future of human health.
• Farm to Fable
  This series of articles from the Tampa Bay Times looks for the truth behind food claims such as “organic,” “local,” and “farm to table.” Part 1 deals with restaurants, while Part 2 looks at farmers’ markets. Though the findings are specific to the Tampa area, their lessons no doubt apply throughout the US. The series also includes a helpful consumer guide to figuring out if your “local” food really is local.
• Eat No Evil
  What does it mean to eat ethically? In this thoughtful piece for GQ, Alan Richman describes his month-long journey “from perfectly sustainable farm to perhaps unsustainable sea,” meeting the people striving to produce food “that meets whatever definition of ethical eating they have embraced.”