Food is a fundamental necessity in any society. However, most modern people have only a vague understanding of the journey their everyday food goes through before it reaches the table.

In this book, journalist and author Mark Bittman examines how the desire to feed ourselves led humanity to slavery, colonialism, famine, genocide, and how we arrived at today’s situation, where major food companies are ravaging the planet and poisoning its inhabitants, tricking consumers into buying junk food created for enormous profits.

By definition, food provides nutrients, and nutrients promote health. However, in our topsy-turvy reality, so much of what we eat has the opposite effect. Over-processed foods, more like poison than real food, make us sick as surely as vitamin deficiency.

However, the author does not consider the situation hopeless: summing up the positive experience of the agroecological program and peasant agriculture, he sees prospects in a world free from the dictates of global monopolies and appeals to ordinary people, activists, and governments of all countries with a call to change the existing system.

You can be thin and still have metabolic syndrome (a group of disease conditions), high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and any of a dozen diet-related cancers. Conversely, you can be overweight and none of the above. Our obsession with fatness as a problem requiring an immediate solution is driven by our culture's fixation on it, as well as our tendency to blame people themselves for their woes, rather than explore the less obvious causes that affect us all.