Announcements
JUST RELEASED!
Why Waste Food?
Andrew F. Smith
About one-third of all food grown for human consumption is lost or discarded every year, despite financial, environmental and ethical reasons to not waste food. We grow enough food to adequately feed everyone in the world, yet hundreds of millions of people suffer from hunger, malnutrition or food insecurity. Together it accounts for about 8 per cent of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions. So, if wasting food is such a patently bad idea, why do we discard so much?
In Why Waste Food?, Andrew F. Smith investigates one of today’s most pressing topics, examining the causes of avoidable food waste across the supply chain, and highlighting the ways in which we can all do something to tackle this global concern.
NEW RELEASES!
Sugar: A Global History
Andrew F. Smith
It’s no surprise that sugar has been on our minds for several millenia. First cultivated in New Guinea around 8,000 B.C.E., this addictive sweetener has since come to dominate our appetites-whether in candy, desserts, soft drinks, or even pasta sauces-for better and for worse. In this book, Andrew F. Smith offers a fascinating history of this simultaneously beloved and reviled ingredient, holding its incredible value as a global commodity up against its darker legacies of slavery and widespread obesity.
As Smith demonstrates, sugar’s past is chock-full of determined adventurers: relentless sugar barons and plantation owners who worked alongside plant breeders, food processors, distributors, and politicians to build a business based on our cravings. Exploring both the sugarcane and sugar beet industries, he tells story after story of those who have made fortunes and those who have met demise all because of sugar’s simple but profound hold on our palettes. Delightful and surprisingly action-packed, this book offers a layered and definitive tale of sugar and the many people who have been caught in its spell-from barons to slaves, from chefs to the countless among us born with that insatiable devil, the sweet tooth.