Cook’s riveting and timely investigation takes us beyond Fast Food Nation to explain why our entire food system is in crisis. Corporate consolidation of farms and supermarkets, high-tech drives to increase productivity, misplaced subsidies for exports, and inadequate regulation have all combined to produce a grim harvest. In these pages we encounter fruit and vegetables laminated by crop spray, slaughterhouses that transport illegal immigrants to the United States to butcher diseased meat for less than the minimum wage, and the near-extinction of American family farms. And, he examines the alternatives: the growth of organic food, farmers markets and food co-operatives, and the slow food and food justice movements. Now in paperback, with a new preface from the author.