RaveThe New York Times Book Review... matches our moment — evincing a necessary sense of urgency but also making no bones about the challenge before us ... Just recognizing the awe-inspiring scale of the problem has persuaded most writers to take on some narrower slice and go deep. But Bittman clearly relishes the mad ambition of his undertaking, often buoying the reader across waves of information with the sheer momentum of his narrative. If it feels a bit breathless at first, Bittman settles into his story soon enough, delivering a clear and compelling compendium of modern agriculture ... In particular, his rendering of the early mechanization of the American farm is epic and engrossing. We feel swept up in the promise and possibility of all that new technology, so much so that the turn from agriculture to agribusiness, though we know it’s coming, still delivers a crushing blow ... He doesn’t lapse into the polemic of some policy wonks who too often want to make every error seem foreseeable or the product of some unforgivable flaw ... These nuances not only allow us to approach policy issues with more complexity, they also temper our moral certainty. By the time Bittman reaches his final section, simply titled \'Change,\' he has earned the right to damn the evident flaws of our system. He has the wisdom not to dwell on the shortsighted ambition that brought us here but rather to offer an equally evenhanded assessment of several failed attempts to undo our errors ... I’m freshly persuaded by Bittman’s framing.
