A fascinating exploration of our past, present, and future relationship with food

For the first time in human history, there is food in abundance throughout the world. More people than ever before are now freed of the struggle for daily survival, yet few of us are aware of how food lands on our plates. Behind every meal you eat, there is a story. Hamburgers in Paradise explains how.

In this wise and passionate book, Louise Fresco takes readers on an enticing cultural journey to show how science has enabled us to overcome past scarcities-and why we have every reason to be optimistic about the future. Using hamburgers in the Garden of Eden as a metaphor for the confusion surrounding food today, she looks at everything from the dominance of supermarkets and the decrease of biodiversity to organic foods and GMOs. She casts doubt on many popular claims about sustainability, and takes issue with naïve rejections of globalization and the idealization of "true and honest" food. Fresco explores topics such as agriculture in human history, poverty and development, and surplus and obesity. She provides insightful discussions of basic foods such as bread, fish, and meat, and intertwines them with social topics like slow food and other gastronomy movements, the fear of technology and risk, food and climate change, the agricultural landscape, urban food systems, and food in art.

The culmination of decades of research, Hamburgers in Paradise provides valuable insights into how our food is produced, how it is consumed, and how we can use the lessons of the past to design food systems to feed all humankind in the future.

Louise O. Fresco is president of Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands. The author of several books, she is a member of the Council of Advisors for the World Food Prize and has worked extensively in developing countries for many years. She lives in Amsterdam.

INTRODUCTION Food-A Voyage of Discovery ix
ONE Paradise: An Exceptional Ecology 1
Pictures of Paradise 1
Paradise as an Ecosystem 8
Paradise Measured against an Ecological Yardstick 11
Paradise as a Garden 15
The Paradise Theory 19
TWO Eve's Temptation: Apple and Hamburger 27
Fall and Knowledge 27
Scarcity and Temptation 33
Rules and Taboos 37
Eve's Hamburger 42
THREE Agriculture: A Triumph of Hard Work 49
Agriculture as Myth 49
The Very Beginning 53
Domestication of Plants and Animals 61
Farming as an Ecological Balancing Act 68
The Dominant Form of Land Use 72
Agriculture as a Matter of Public Interest 79
FOUR Bread: The Most Iconic of Foods 83
Bread as a Symbol 83
Bread as a Staple 88
Carbohydrates 97
Bread and Health 99
FIVE Meat: Necessity and Luxury 103
The Omnivorous Human 107
Essential Nutrients 113
Meat as an Unavoidable By-Product 115
Animal Proteins Have a Place in Almost All Cultures 117
Unease and Change 123
Traditional and Ritual Slaughter 128
Dangers of Livestock Farming 130
New Proteins, New Ideas 132
Meat Avoiders, Meat Reducers, and Flexitarians 137
SIX Liquid Paradise: Food from Water 141
Darting Fish and Dark Monsters 141
Human and Fish 145
From Fish 'n' Chips to Sashimi 152
Seas of Plenty 157
Taming Fish: Aquaculture 162
From Plenty to an Awareness of Scarcity 165
SEVEN Hairy Apples: The Challenge of Biotechnology 171
On Chaos, Monsters, and Paradise 171
Genetic Intervention as Part of Our History 174
Genetic Modification as Continuity and Discontinuity 179
The End and the Means 186
Biotechnology, Hunger, and Poverty (1): The Case of Cassava 189
Biotechnology, Hunger, and Poverty (2): Golden Rice 194
Risks and Continuing Controversies 197
Genetic Resources Aplenty 204
Lost Innocence 208
EIGHT Homesick for Paradise: "Organic" and "Natural" 213
"Organic" and "Natural" as a Moral Choice 213
Related Ideas 219
What Exactly Is "Organic"? 223
Is Organic Better? 227
The Weight of Good Intentions 236
NINE Biodiversity: From Landscape to Gene 243
The Renaissance of the Countryside 246
From Countryside to Cultivated Landscape 251
Farming and Biological Diversity 255
Diversity and Food Security 262
TEN Roast Wolf and Deconstructed Olive: Cooking and Eating as a Worldview 275
Cooking and Eating in the Food Chain 275
Raw, Cooked, and Pure 281
Food as a Mirror of a Changing World 290
Cooking as Construct and Philosophy 296
Slow Food and Whole Food 299
Dinner's Ready! 303
Eating and Cooking as a Dilemma 307
ELEVEN Paradise on Every Street Corner: Food in the City 311
Onions beside the Highways 311
The Belly of the City 319
Daily Temptation: The Supermarket 324
The City as a Public Eating Place 330
Food and Green Places as Urban Counterculture 335
City Farming: The New Interweaving of the City and Food Production 338
The High-Tech Green Metropolis 341
TWELVE An Embarrassment of Riches: The Food Chain 345
The Long Road from Farm to Fork 345
Safe, but Not Risk Free 349
Chained by Chains 354
The Dilemmas of Human Food Supplies 361
Reading Food: Logos, Certificates, and Labels 368
THIRTEEN A Shrinking Paradise: Back to Scarcity? 375
Paradise in Crisis 375
Nature and Guilt 380
How Scarcity Disappeared 386
Trouble in Paradise: Real Scarcity and Shrinkage 389
Paradise Won and Lost 399
FOURTEEN A Paradise within Reach: Sustainable Food Production 403
The Future Is Now 403
Lessons of the Green Revolution 408
The Price of Food 414
Sustainability as Political Consensus 417
Market Failures 421
Small Farms: The Key to Sustainable Food? 425
Sustainable Green Revolutions 428
FIFTEEN Food: Irresistible and Emotionally Charged 437
Hunger and Scarcity 437
Beyond Paradise: The Distribution of Scarcity 441
The Obesogenic Environment 444
Fat or Lean 448
Emotionally Charged Food 454
Food Choice and Moderation 457
From Abundance to a Healthy Balance 461
SIXTEEN In Conclusion: Eve's Paradise 471
The Hamburgerization of the World 471
Paradise Lost and Found 475
The Great Stalemate 479
Dietary Laws, Again 483
And Paradise? 487
Bibliography 491
Index 519
Color plates follow pages 174 and 270.