One morning while reading Barron's, Kara Newman took note of a casual bit of advice offered by famed commodities trader Jim Rogers. "Buy breakfast," he told investors, referring to the increasing value of pork belly and frozen orange juice futures. The statement inspired Newman to take a closer look at agricultural commodities, from the iconic pork belly to the obscure peppercorn and nutmeg. The results of her investigation, recorded in this fascinating...

It's a perverse fact of modern life: There are more starving people in the world than ever before, while there are also more people who are overweight. To find out how we got to this point and what we can do about it, Raj Patel launched a comprehensive investigation into the global food network. It took him from the colossal supermarkets of California to India's wrecked paddy-fields and Africa's bankrupt coffee farms, while along the way he ate genetically...

Argues that lobbyists and the consolidation and corporate control of food production is to blame for the unhealthy and unfair agricultural policies of the United States.

"In a little town in upstate New York, a close-knit family struggles over many decades to hold onto a small dairy farm. With extraordinary candor and heartbreaking intimacy, this poignant documentary brings to light the true story of an American family: their hopes and dreams, their triumphs over tragedy, the modern conflicts that divide them and the love that binds them together. At the center of this world, Langdon "Lanny" Ames, the fifth generation...

In the early 1980s, farmers were suffering through the worst economic crisis to hit rural America since the Great Depression. Land prices were down, operating costs and interest rates were up, and severe weather devastated crops. Instead of receiving assistance from the government as they had in the 1930s, these hardworking family farmers were threatened with foreclosure by the very agency that Franklin Delano Roosevelt created to help them. Desperate,...

"A work of narrative nonfiction chronicling the rise of Juul, the most prominent e-cigarette company, and the birth of a new addiction"--