This was such an interesting read, and also somewhat of a depressing one. I do feel like the author took on a rather doomsday tone and that some of her arguments fail to consider certain logistical concerns that normal, everyday people have. Nevertheless, this offered some fascinating facts that I had no idea about previously and definitely encouraged me to be more thoughtful about what I'm putting into my body.

I received a free copy from NetGalley. A great book on why "natural" and organic are a start, but not enough, specially now that big food as made those labels less than they once were and since our guts are missing the stuff our ancestors use to have to keep them healthy. But since cooking whole organic food is needed, and time is needed to do that, industrial and cultural changes are needed to make us healthier. Lots of studies quoted to back up the information, but I finished feeling like why bother, the little bit I do for my family isn't enough to make a difference. (That said, I still think you should read it to be aware of what is going on.)

The author’s message is clear and concise and is one that, in my opinion, should be heard by everyone. Even when we think we are making healthy choices we may not be and the ramifications of unhealthy food choices go deeper than many believe. I found this book tremendously informative and educational

This book explores what really goes on in the food industry and how much this will affect us.

Filled with information, I found that sometimes, the author went a bit too in-depth about certain topics. Nonetheless, this is a good book if you'd like to know more about nutrition, processed and organic food.

This book has a lot of information but is simply explained. I can’t wait to get a physical copy to underline and take notes. I have a healthy skepticism of the food industry and have done research on my own but this book has lots of new to me information! I expected it to be repetitive because a lot of problems with food have existed for decades but I really appreciated this authors perspective and the way she kept pointing back to how she would explain things to her grandmother. Great read, very eye opening if you don’t know about a lot of lies on food packaging and still eye opening if you do!

There was some good information in this book, but overall it was repetitive and had a distinct pro breast-feeding agenda. Not everyone can breastfeed and this book really focused on the topic.

Better books on this topic exist.

FORMERLY KNOWN AS FOOD

My first thought upon reading Kristin Lawless’ book Formerly Known as Food was “Naomi Klein could have written this.”

Offering a critical perspective on the industrial food complex that sustains much of modern society shares, Lawless pulls no punches in her examination of present-day food culture.

First, the obvious disclaimer: there’s no denying that the industrialization of our food supply has been a great boon for civilization. Not only has it resulted in a much more stable supply chain for mass nutrition, but at present it also makes it possible for food from all over the world to be available practically regardless of season. More, technological advances mean that our food can now be infused with vitamins and minerals, or that food can be broken down into the specific component parts that we desire (such as egg whites, for instance). The confluence of all these things taken together is what makes possible the foodie culture signal boosted by popular media on a daily basis.

Author Lawless sees at least three problems in all this that she expounds upon in Formerly Known as Food:

One, it’s too soon to tell exactly how the mass industrialization of food is affecting the human race. It’s only now that an entire generation of people are being raised on diets from foods that rely on chemicals and animal breeding practices whose point is quantity over quality. As such, there’s no telling what effects such things will have on our microbiota––although some research on the topic already suggest that those effects can’t be good.

Two, the healthfulness of present day foods that are either fortified with additional nutrients or broken down into their component parts should be suspect. On this matter, she puts forward her “Whole Egg Theory” of nutrition, an analogy which posits that chicken eggs contain everything needed to sustain life (if allowed to grow, they would otherwise become live chickens, after all). Despite this, the practice of eating only egg whites is perceived as more healthful than that of eating whole eggs, largely because of historical accident based on outdated science. And when it comes to food in general, there’s more than enough bad science if not outright pseudo-science to go around.

Last, this situation is not helped by the fact that its difficult to regulate the food industry in general. Part of the story is regulatory capture, and how there appears to be a revolving door within government bureaucracies for the industry professionals who should be regulated. Another is the sheer scope of the endeavor, where an unsuspecting public sometimes does not realize that jargon such as “organic” may have no nutritional value, and where even the nutritional information on food packaging can be deceiving, given that some foods labeled zero something-or-other (e.g. calorie, fat, etc.) do still contain the same but at thresholds below the legal limits. This is to say nothing about when governments and scientists get it wrong, as what happened when trans fats were once proclaimed as safe to eat, with dire consequences many years later.

Lawless assembles a convincing argument about all that is wrong about “big food,” and evidently has no qualms calling out fellow food writers for having blind spots on some of these points (she takes aim at the always thoughtful Michael Pollan, for instance). Certainly, anyone who reads Formerly Known as Food will look at the food they eat in a different light and reconsider what “healthy” food is and should be. For my part, I felt the While Egg Theory was a real winner.

On the other hand, while Lawless proves quite capable at identifying the problem(s) she appears less adept at presenting solutions. There are many excellent points brought up in Formerly Known as Food, yet I couldn’t help but feel at times that Lawless was more concerned about driving home the same point from different angles rather than writing about what can be or is already being done about it. Thus, when she finally presents her own idea for a solution––basically, paying people to cook at home as a means to encourage frontline exposure to nutrition––it struck me as underwhelming. This is so not because of the merits of the suggestion or lack thereof, but because I felt it had been drowned out by all that she had written before that.

Yet the first step to solving a problem lies with correctly defining it, or at the very least describing it. Formerly Known as Food is Lawless’ take on the many things that are not quite right about our food and the assumptions we make about it. One can hope that therein lie the seeds to viable solutions.

Formerly Known As Food: How the Industrial Food System Is Changing Our Minds, Bodies, and Culture, by Kristin Lawless, is, hands-down, the most well-written and interesting book out there on the subject of America’s food supply. Not only does her personality come through to make the book fascinating, but she backs up the information with studies and facts so that readers can feel the seriousness of what is being done to our food. It is rare for a non-fiction book crammed with studies, facts, and information like this to be one that cannot be put down, but Lawless has done it. Formerly Known As Food should be mandatory reading for anyone who actually eats food in America.

The ease of getting and fixing food has made us forget what REAL food is. This book is a huge eye opener! I suggest everyone read this! I am still blown away by it.

This book reminds me a little of "Fast Food Nation." It's a cautionary tale of what we are actually doing to our bodies by consuming pesticide-ridden, chemically treated foods. There's a ton of fascinating info throughout the whole book, but it's definitely a terrifying read. Lawless does include some suggestions on what the US can do to detoxify our food system, but it's hugely unsettling to read how the foods we're consuming (especially as infants) is probably the reason why so many of us end up with diseases and chronic conditions. There were a few sections that felt a little too textbook, but overall, this was an eye-opening (and disturbing) title.

Eye opening and shocking, the insight into what goes on your plate is stunning. Incredibly readable and keeps you wanting to turn the pages with disbelief. Well researched and engrossing, excellent.

I thought I would really like this book, and initially, I did. But the author gets a bit preachy in areas. I think I was expecting less proselytizing and more microhistory.

This book was really interesting and eye-opening. It is very shocking to see how the industrial production of foods affects the nutritional value of what we eat and also in consequence, how our bodies change because of our diet. I think that Kristin Lawless explains these issues very well and I didn't have any problems understanding her arguments. But she does not only focus on the agricultural and biological dimension, she also talks about the consequences that it has for our society. She dismantles some myths about healthy eating and official health labels as well. I also appreciated her thoughts on feminism and how technological changes in the home influenced both the way in which we eat as well as how they helped second wave feminism succeed. This helped me me understand how second wave feminism could emerge.

I would have liked some more practical suggestions for me as a consumer and maybe also how we can improve our food situation. It was a very good explanation of the current state and how we got there, but I would like to know how to get out as well.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in nutrition. It was very good.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

And here’s a screed against artifical/industrial food, lacking nutrients that used to be found in more traditional plants/animals and full of chemicals whose long-term effects we don’t know. It’s a terrifying book that takes the position that all the individualistic actions that (especially wealthy white American) people take, like buying expensive organics, won’t really help in the absence of systemic reform. She says that if you’ve ever taken antibiotics or had a C-section or if your mom or grandma did then your microbiota won’t be good enough to transfer to your baby via breastfeeding, but at the same time she goes on and on about how awful it is not to breastfeed. Just because something is “natural and biological” doesn’t, in fact, make it available to everyone. And I was also unhappy with “some research seems to indicate that the state of the mother’s immune system is the determining factor in whether her child will be autistic”—from the refrigerator mother to the incubator mother?

Before societal transformation, Lawless argues that you should still eat only whole and intact foods, like a whole egg and not like non-fat milk. It is plausible that we don’t know about all the long-term effects of chemicals that affect hormones, and Lawless cites evidence that they don’t follow ordinary dose-response curves such that the low doses we’re all constantly exposed to might have different and worse effects than high doses. Beyond banning these chemicals, Lawless thinks major economic and social changes are required, including anti-poverty, pro-child care reforms.

Kristin Lawless's arguments in Formerly Known as Food: How the Industrial Food System is Changing Our Minds, Bodies, and Culture are alternatively obvious, shocking, and ridiculous.



First, the obvious. Americans have become over-dependent on processed, packaged foods. Due to convenience, cost, and economies of scale, our food supply has come to be controlled by a very small number of powerful companies, and we Americans happily eat it up. Over the course of the last several decades, eating whole foods, close to their geographical origin and close their original form, has become more and more expensive and difficult.



Even packaged products that attest to be more healthy for us are subject to the processing, shipping, and additives that rob them of their nutritional value or make them more dangerous to us. Lawless's description of the processing of milk made me want to avoid it, or to find a local dairy where I can get milk directly from a cow.



While we obviously ought to try to eat more whole foods and fewer processed, packaged foods, the sections dealing with the chemical effects of food, food additives, herbicides and insecticides, and packaging really rocked me. In many cases, the chemicals in foods are so common that they are changing the way our bodies respond to food. These changes are pervasive and are passed on to the next generation. A couple of examples: certain chemicals actually make fat cells larger, causing obesity. (So it's not TOTALLY my fault that I'm overweight; it the chemicals in the food I eat!)



More chillingly,

We have caused one crucially important and protective strain of bacteria normally found in the baby's gut to go extinct in the Western world. A woman of child-bearing age who was born by C-section, fed formula, or received antibiotics at any point in her life--or if this is true of her mother or grandmother, does not have the important bacterial species B. infantis--it simply no longer exists in her body.
This points to one of her biggest issues: the decline of breastfeeding and the use of formula, the first toehold of industrial food in our lives. Lawless explains that while our life spans are longer than previous generations due to antibiotics and vaccines, that trend will begin to reverse due to industrial food and the impact it has on our bodies.



Lawless gets into the ridiculous with her sweeping societal solutions. Guaranteed annual income, pay for one's own domestic work, shorter work weeks and longer leave for parents, and more socialist solutions. Her answer to the question of how this will be paid for is, "Well, we spend way more on defense than we really need to. . . ."



I share Lawless's suspicion of "big food," and she certainly convinces me to eat more whole foods and avoid heavily processed food. But even she has to admit that large-scale industrial agriculture has made it possible to feed our ever-growing global population. Small-scale urban farming and food co-ops are awesome. But are they sufficient to food millions of people in a densely populated urban area? I'm not so sure. And her utopian, socialist solutions sound compassionate and simple on paper, but let's ask every socialist country in the world how their socialist programs worked out? Not so well.



The bottom line on Formerly Known as Food: take heed of Lawless's warnings about the food we eat, and make every effort to include whole foods in your diet and avoid processed foods as much as possible. However, for large-scale solutions, she--and we--have a lot more work to do.





Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!

I was really excited about this book because the description made it sound so in line with my way of thinking but once I got into it I felt like it was just a giant rant. It was hard to get past the very snarky writing. I do agree with the importance of know how food is made but I didnt see this book sending the right message.

This book is a gut punch that is not easily digested (see what I did there?), in which the author basically takes everything that you've always kind of known about processed food and shoves it in your face until you can't look away or unsee what you see. Basically a manifesto, Lawless mercilessly deconstructs the industrialized food complex of America. Heavy on diagnosis, light on a scalable prescription, I'd recommend this to anyone to read. It may not have a lot of solutions on offer, but you can't solve a problem that you don't acknowledge. This book details that problem in excruciating (but in a good way-- the brutality of this book is kind of a masterpiece) detail

Our thinking about food has changed drastically, even within our own lifetimes but also since the Industrial Revolution. This book is a good summary of current knowledge, much of which those of us interested in the subject will already be aware of but it is handy to have it all in one source.
There is a convincing argument for eating complete eggs (i.e. not just the egg-whites) : that they are a whole food, intended as a complete nutrition source.
An interesting section on baby foods - I'd never thought about them being a relatively recent 'invention',
although they certainly weren't available when I was a child. Also about baby formula - how it always
tastes the same, & is therefore not preparing babies for a variety of different flavours in their future diet.
There is always more to be learned, & this book serves as a good introduction to what we need to know about food.

This is a very enjoyable and educational read. Lawless outlines the faults with the current food production system and steps to help improve it.

I have researched and received a lot of education in this field of study, so I am familiar with many of the concepts she introduces. While some of the book brings up some very good issues, some of her conclusions directly oppose a number of studies that I have found through research, so I do not agree with all of her opinions on healthy eating, nutritionally speaking. However, I do agree that much of the food today has been tampered with to a dangerous level and love the idea of trying to eat more whole food. While much of the damage is done and each person growing their own organic garden and avoiding as many unnatural byproducts as possible is ideal, it is not realistic, nor obtainable for most. However, I always advocating trying to eat healthier whole food and eliminating junk, so this is a great read for anyone wanting to improve their health through their diet.

The amount of research Lawless poured into this book is amazing and I do commend her on that! For the most part, a lot of the information that was presented in this book were things I agreed with but had also heard minimally from other sources. In a way, I was pleased to see that some topics and ideas about food were flushed out here and I found myself learning a lot. I found Lawless's sections on poverty and the lack of access many communities face to quality, whole foods particularly poignant because I believe it is not talked about enough. This book centers around a few central ideas for food change: change labeling, breastfeed children, eat whole foods, and a few others. On the flipside, some of Lawless's writing is just downright scary - such as her adhesions that food touching plastic automatically makes food not good enough for us to eat!