A review by thomp649
Food Justice by Robert Gottlieb, Anupama Joshi

2.0

I read this book when it first came out. It was on an airplane. I probably didn't give it the credit due at the time, because I remember thinking that I wasn't learning much from it. I had spoken to quite a few of the same people Anupama Joshi interviewed for the book, and I suspected we had been at the same meetings sponsored by the Kellogg Foundation. Yet it does a great job of pulling the diverse threads of the food movement together between two covers, and it is about as easy to read as idea-driven non-fiction ever gets. Why two stars, then? I re-read it cover to cover quite recently, and while I would still recommend it for newbies in the food world, I was put off by the way it felt like a recruiting pep-talk. Gottlieb and Joshi have not a single good word to say about for-profit actors, especially food retailers and agricultural input firms. And the book does not delve deeply into internal conflicts that can put activists working within the food movement at odds with one another. I think I would still put Raj Patel's Stuffed and Starved a notch above Food Justice, (but maybe it's time for me to re-read Patel, too).