Product Description

Now completely updated, this award-winning atlas maps every aspect of the food chain, from farming, production and retail to the food on our plates. It also investigates how, in an era of new technologies, globalized food trade and even plentiful supply, millions remain hungry.Topics include: Prices and Shortages; Malnutrition; Dietary Changes and Increasing Obesity; Climate Change Impacts; Industrial Farming; Live Animal Trade; GM Crops; Fertilizers and Pesticides; Organic Farming; Land Ownership; Trade Justice; and, Fast Food and Additives.Visually exciting, easy-to-use, full-colour maps and graphics present clear explanations and authoritative data - from plough to plate.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #65038 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Review
"* 'This Atlas is a generous gift to the world community of people who care about food in any of its dimensions. We owe it a great round of applause' Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics * 'An extraordinarily clear basis for understanding the underlying issues, this vital study clearly shows how threatened the security of the food supply chain has become in a globally interconnected world' Ecologist * 'A remarkable book that reveals with devastating clarity the bizarre way the world feeds itself' The Food Programme, BBC Radio 4 * 'Impressive and far-ranging... extremely useful' Financial Times * 'A unique and easily accessible insight into the way our world food system works. This splendid presentation of deeply worrying data and trends should be a wake-up call' Times Higher Education Supplement"

THE FOOD MAGAZINE
This is a rich and stimulating cornucopia of selected, enticing
snippets of information.

THE FINANCIAL TIMES
Impressive and far-ranging... An extremely useful and
comprehensive, if disturbing, read.

Customer Reviews

If food facts could speak, this book would be a desperate scream
Erik and Tim succeed in neatly presenting the extremely complex environment of the food supply chain as well as the substantial misconceptions that society has about food, its entire production and consumption chain as well as its consequences. For anyone even slightly motivated to reconsider his food choices and dietary behaviour, this book gives a wealth of arguments for tackling things differently. This atlas should be compulsory study in every education. Moreover its concept and design has strong educational potential.
I may fancy maps and atlases more than the average person, but the sheer pleasure of discovering so many insights in a such a simple way will surely work for most readers. The visuals used fit this type of information extremely well with and they make the key learnings from this atlas quite obvious for anyone.
As a compact database, the atlas is equally useful for the professional who needs to get a first view on some other aspects of this complex area where he may have less expertise.
If more people would have only a superficial understanding of some of the issues and causal interrelationships that figure in this book, it would already make a significant difference for the way our societies would value and use natural resources . This book is therefore very recommendable and useful reading and will definitely change the way you look at food and your daily consumption patterns.

Very Interesting well-presented facts & figures
At first it looked like a boring textbook, but it has a lot of information in easy to read format. I was especially interested in the charts at the back with information such as average birthweights, rates of heart disease, diabetes, amount of potable water per person, average calories consumed for countries. Compared side-by-side some figures really jump out at you. You'll learn which countries eat the most organic produce, which use the most pesticides (Beware the ones that won't report), which grow what where and so much more. I found this book fascinating.

International map of food
Food is vital for our health and welfare, and its production critically affects the environment as well as the wealth of nations. Despite a rapid increase in trade, hundreds of millions of people remain hungry, while chronic obesity is increasing worldwide.
Vividly presented through the creative use of maps and graphics, this atlas provides clear, authoritative and comprehensive accounts of the food chain, from plough to plate, and reveals how it affects the lives and livelihoods of us all, farmers and suburban shoppers alike.
One of the global maps in the book highlights the amounts of pesticides used per unit area across the world. The text goes on to remind the reader that pesticides are aggressively promoted worldwide, in particular in Asia and Latin America. But although they appear to provide a short-term increase in productivity, estimates of their value to agriculture rarely take into account their true costs. This includes damage to the environment and to human health, the development of pesticide-resistant pests, and the expense of testing for residues and disposing of unwanted chemicals.