Diet for a Dead Planet:
Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis
Christopher’s acclaimed first book, Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis, was widely praised and is available in paperback. The book investigates how food, our most basic necessity, has become a source of crises rather than sustenance and nourishment. From perilous meatpacking plants, to massive toxic factory farms, to corporate supermarket supply chains, Cook’s sweeping investigation explores our whole food system, from the fields to our dinner tables.
The facts speak for themselves: more than 75 million Americans suffered from food poisoning last year, and 5,000 of them died; 67 percent of American males are overweight, obesity is the second leading cause of preventable death in the United States and supersizing is just the tip of the iceberg: the way we make and eat food today is putting our environment and the very future of food at risk.
Diet for a Dead Planet takes us beyond Fast Food Nation to show how our entire food system is in crisis. Corporate control of farms and supermarkets, unsustainable drives to increase agribusiness productivity and profits, misplaced subsidies for exports, and anemic regulation have all combined to produce a grim harvest. Food, our most basic necessity, has become a force behind a staggering array of social, economic, and environmental epidemics.
Yet there is another way. Cook argues cogently for a whole new way of looking at what we eat―one that places healthy, sustainably produced food at the top of the menu for change. In the words of Jim Hightower, "If you eat, read this important book!"
Available for purchase from The New Press
“Diet stands in the classic American tradition of muckraking journalism ...packed with information that consumers need and policy makers should be acting on.”
“A blistering polemic that details why American agriculture should be weaned from multi-billion dollar government subsidies that undermine Third World farmers, leaving them impoverished while Americans grow obese.”
“Christopher Cook lays out a far-reaching takedown of the American food industry, from factory farms to supermarkets to federal regulators.”
“In this well-researched and hard-hitting book, [Cook] lifts the veil and reveals what you can do to bring food and agriculture back from the brink. This book is a forceful reminder that food should be — and can be — a way of life, not a way of death, for communities, our bodies, and the planet.”
“Explains with distaste exactly how, via free trade, a few megacompanies dominate the food industry from the seed to the supermarkets… Cook’s horrifying exposé deserves to be as influential as Lappé’s bestseller [Diet for a Small Planet]”
“Diet for a Dead Planet provides the big picture, along with fascinating details, to motivate change before it’s too late. Armed with Cook’s compelling exposé, we don’t have to be victims. We can choose life.”
“A compelling indictment of big agriculture that exposes horrific practices rampant in factory farms and feedlots... Cook traces the destruction of family farms and the rise of agribusiness and processed foods, finishing with a hopeful examination of the burgeoning organic and slow food movements.”
“Though this hard-hitting opus ought to give anyone pause for concern, there is hope in the notion that it might not be too late to rethink our attitudes about agriculture and dietary principles.”
“Because the vast majority of food safety problems could be ameliorated by smaller farms, Cook — with Jim Hightower-like rhetoric — skewers the ConAgras, Monsantos and Cargills of the world for turning traditional farmers into heavily indebted serfs while these behemoths control our food from “farm gate to dinner plate.”
“Cook gives us the tools and the history, and he asks the right questions — in this super-sized world, can we inspire the commitment needed for change?”
“Cook’s is a book that forces you to look at things that you took for granted. Like breakfast.”
“Diet for a Dead Planet is as realistic as the fight against globalisation gets.”
“Diet for a Dead Planet makes a compelling case that all of us should take a closer look at what we eat and where and how our food is produced.”
Road Ghosts: A Memoir
Road Ghosts, Christopher’s new coming-of-age memoir, is a fully completed and revised 313-page book now being shopped to agents and publishers. Contact Christopher to request the manuscript, samples, or book synopsis and marketing plan.
In this sprawling lyrical road adventure, Christopher explores America and himself in a quest for liberation, purpose, and reawakening. Struggling in San Francisco amid the 1991 recession, toiling at temp jobs and chronically broke, Cook hits the road in his rusted Toyota hatchback with a few hundred dollars and piles of books, clothes, a manual typewriter, and $90 worth of canned foods.
Road Ghosts offers readers a rollicking and colorful journey traversing California, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, and several other states. Exploring far-flung towns on dirt roads, gun shows, hobo alleys, and back country rancher bars, Cook evokes a poetic passion for adventure and the American landscape. On the road, Cook encounters a striking array of characters: Clifford, a soaringly tall rail-skinny old man spinning yarns from the Bible in a town park; Loomis, a self-described war hero who puts the author up in his trailer for a few days in Ringling, Montana; Cecil, a bone-weary philosophical Idaho rancher contemplating second chances; tale-telling “snow birds” drifting around America in their mobile homes; punk rockers crammed in a Minneapolis attic, hiding from the police; right-wing pamphleteers in an Iowa roadside parking lot; and many others.
Road Ghosts unfolds a tale that’s both timeless and timely: an earnest probing journey, and a passionate search for meaning and purpose in America, at a time when Americans are thirsting for adventure, escape, and meaning in this age of pandemic, chronic economic struggle, and our relentlessly digitized and curated world. Road Ghosts offers readers a fresh, compelling, and expansive view into a different way of living and thinking.
Advance Praise for Road Ghosts:
“This is an exciting and brave book. In Road Ghosts, Christopher Cook takes us beyond the usual terrain of memoirs with a fresh poetic voice and a penetrating inquiry of both himself and our times. The writing is beautiful and searching, as is Cook’s quest. What a fun, riveting, and soul-opening ride this book is. Cook has created something profoundly fresh and alive.”
“Cook’s story is so much about being broke in America. Cook owns it all: the highways, the dust, the literature, the truth of what it means to be young and unmoored, impoverished and full of passion.”