Ecologist Mark Easter offers a detailed picture of the impact the foods you love have on the earth. Organized by the ingredients of a typical dinner party, including seafood, salad, bread, chicken, steak, potatoes, and fruit pie with ice cream, each chapter examines the food through the lens of the climate crisis. Not a cookbook, but instead, gathered like guests around the table, you will find the stories of these foods: the soil that grew the lettuce, the farmers and ranchers and orchardists who steward the land, the dairy and farm workers and grocers who labor to bring it to the table. Each chapter reveals the causes and effects of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the social and environmental impact of out-of-season and far-from-home demand.
What can you do to eat more sustainably? Food lovers everywhere will be happy to know that the answer is not necessarily a plant-based diet. For each food group, Easter offers not recipes but low-carbon, in-season alternatives that make your favorite foods not only more sustainable but also more delicious.
The first step, however, is an understanding of how food is grown, produced, harvested, and shipped. In stories both personal and entertaining, the author offers a full understanding of what's for dinner.
"The Blue Plate is the food book of the decade, and it tastes like hope. With the story-telling chops of Michael Pollen, the ethics of Thoreau, and the climate expertise of James Hanson, Mark Easter lays it all out: We CAN feed the world and nourish the earth at the same time. Here is how it can be done. And here is how you can participate. Authoritative, entertaining, and useful -- this is the book I have been waiting for."
-- Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Encouragement for Earth's Weary Lovers
"Tag along with one of the premier scientists studying our food system's carbon footprint, as he takes us on a fascinating journey to meet the farmers, ranchers, and composters who are dramatically slashing emissions and transforming agriculture from a climate problem to a climate solution."
Liz Carlisle, author of Lentil Underground, Grain by Grain, and Healing Grounds
"An entertaining, enlightening, and uplifting guide to the food-climate connection."
--David R. Montgomery, co-author of What Your Food Ate and The Hidden Half of Nature
"The Blue Plate is an excellent primer on where food comes from--with a reminder that if people are what they eat, they need to be conscientious about that consumption." -- Foreword Reviews