Almost Meatless: Recipes That Are Better for Your Health and the Planetby Jay Manning and Tara Mataraza DesmondTen Speed Press; $22.50Traditionally, there has been a great divide between diehard vegetarians and meat eaters, and it is apparent in most modern-day cookbooks.
MoreNo Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Processby Colin BevanFarrar, Straus and Giroux; $25
Over the past decade, several eco-superheroes have emerged: Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert Redford, and Michael Pollan, among others. In
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Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Ideaby Alice WatersChronicle; $24.95When Alice Waters used to drive by the Martin Luther King Jr. middle school near her neighborhood in Berkeley, CA, she thought it was deserted. The schoolyard looked abandoned, overgrown with weeds and cracked concrete. After mentioning the use—or rather, misuse—of vacant land in a newspaper article about
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What to Eatby Marion NestleNorth Point Press; $16
Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics and nutrition professor at New York University, has been fighting the good food fight for years now, and her latest book continues her critical approach to what we put in our bodies. What to Eat sounds like a question, and the book
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Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating With More Than 75 Recipesby Mark BittmanSimon & Schuster; $24.95
Mark Bittman has been many things in the world of food: chef, traveler, writer and, now, advocate. With Food Matters, Bittman has come around to the sustainable food movement and offers a book with a mixture of the stick
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The Cul-De-Sac Syndrome: Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dreamby John F. WasikBloomberg, $24.95Financial analysts, like the author of this book, have picked out the housing market as the trigger for the current economic downturn. In The Cul-De-Sac Syndrome, John Wasik, a personal finance columnist for Bloomberg News, agrees with that assertion, but says that our
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Exposed: the Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Powerby Mark SchapiroChelsea Green, $16.95There has never been a shortage of books critiquing American government policy or society, but with the current economic crisis, such books now have a lot more cachet. Exposed, by Mark Schapiro, editorial director of the Center for
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Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Lifeby Barbara KingsolverHarper Collins, 2007; $26.95Animal, Vegetable, Miracle will not rest on your bookshelves with Barbara Kingsolver’s fiction; this book demands permanent residence in your kitchen. Filled with delicious, seasonal recipes and tips from growing to canning, this stellar book chronicles the Kingsolvers’ move from Arizona to a
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Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What to Do About Itby Robert GlennonIsland Press, $27.95Unquenchable begins with the story of one of the most obvious and ostentatious wastes of water in America: Las Vegas. A gleaming, neon-bedecked homage to decadence in the middle of the desert, Vegas is a testament to our ability to build what
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Wild Fermentationby Sandor Elix KatzChelsea Green, 2003; $25I’ve lost count of the number of times this book has been recommended or mentioned to me, and it deserves every one. Katz explores the world of fermentable foods, which includes some of the earliest prepared foods humans ate, not only to give you something great to eat,
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