What can we as consumers do about the future of food and agriculture systems?

There’s no one answer, no one starting point, and certainly no one silver-bullet solution, said Danielle Nierenberg, president of Food Tank, a think tank on food.

“There’s a lot of work ahead of us, but this also makes room for us all to use our individual creative strengths to start fixing our food systems,” Nierenberg said.

The Food Tank offers a summer book list of 25 books to expand people’s understanding of food and the environment and help them launch into action:

• “Black, White, and Green: Farmers Markets, Race, and the Green Economy” by Alison Hope Alkon.
• “Building Community Food Webs” by Ken Meter.
• “Can Fixing Dinner Fix the Planet?” by Jessica Fanzo, Ph.D.
• “Decolonizing the Diet: Nutrition, Immunity, and the Warning from Early America” by Gideon Mailer & Nicola Hale.
• “Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader” edited by Robert Ji-Song Ku, Martin F. Manalansan and Anita Mannur.
• “Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature” by Wenying Xu.
• “Eating the Landscape: American Indian Stories of Food, Identity, and Resilience” by Enrique Salmón.
• “For the Love of Soil: Strategies To Regenerate Our Food Production Systems” by Nicole Masters.
• “Indigenous Peoples’ Food Systems: Insights on Sustainability and Resilience from the Front Line of Climate Change” by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT.
• “Our Changing Menu: Climate Change and the Foods We Love and Need” by Michael P. Hoffmann, Carrie Koplinka-Loehr, and Danielle L. Eiseman.
• “Root: Small Vegetable Plates, A Little Meat On The Side” by Rob Howell.
• “Technically Food: Inside Silicon Valley's Mission to Change What We Eat” by Larissa Zimberoff.
• “The Carbon Farming Solution: A Global Toolkit of Perennial Crops and Regenerative Agriculture Practices for Climate Change Mitigation and Food Security” by Eric Toensmeier.
• “The Economics of Sustainable Food: Smart Policies for Health and the Planet” edited by Nicoletta Batini.
• “The Forager Chef’s Book of Flora: Recipes and Techniques for Edible Plants from Garden, Field, and Forest” by Alan Bergo.
• “The Future of Nutrition: An Insider's Look at the Science, Why We Keep Getting It Wrong, and How to Start Getting It Right” by T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D.
• “The Perennial Kitchen: Simple Recipes for a Delicious Future” by Beth Dooley.
• “The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid” by Lawrence Wright.
• “The Premonition: A Pandemic Story” by Michael Lewis.
• “The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen” by Sean Sherman.
• “The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet” by Kristin Ohlson.
• “True Cost Accounting for Food: Balancing the Scale” edited by Barbara Gemmill-Herren, Lauren E. Baker, Paula A. Daniels.
• “We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto” by Alice Waters.
• “What’s Good? A Memoir in Fourteen Ingredients” by Peter Hoffman.
• “Zero Waste Chef” by Anne-Marie Bonneau.

To learn where to find the books, go to “25 Books on Food Tank’s Summer 2021Reading List.”