Over the last twenty or so years, it has become standard to require policy makers to base their recommendations on evidence. That is now uncontroversial to the point of triviality – of course, policy should be based on the facts. But are the methods that policy makers rely on to gather and analyse evidence the right ones? Evidence-Based Policy contends that the dominant methods which are in use now – methods that imitate standard practices in medicine like randomised control trials – do not work. Michael Bassey believes policymakers should engage in the kind of critical and analytical processes advocated by this book before rolling out social changes.

Evidence-Based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing it Better. Nancy Cartwright and Jeremy Hardie.  Oxford University Press. 2012.

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In March this year the UK government announced the launch of a network of six “What Works” centres aimed at providing robust evidence to inform policy making. The rationale was given as “It is a fundamental principle of good public services that decisions are made on the basis of strong evidence and what we know works. Yet all too often evidence is not presented in a simple, relevant format that enables it to be used to its maximum potential by service providers, commissioners and policymakers.” 

This fascinating book was published a few months earlier, although it was unmentioned in the government announcement. It is a tough read, but it should be the standard text for these centres and on the reading list of all nineteen British university courses in PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) – i.e. the breeding ground of politicians: but too late for David Cameron and Ed Miliband who both read PPE at Oxford. In the authors’ own words this is why it deserves attention:

“You are told: use policies that work. And you are told: RCTs – randomized controlled trials – will show you what these are. That’s not so. RCTs are great, but they do not do that for you. They cannot alone support the expectation that a policy will work for you. What they tell you is true – that this policy produced that result there. But they do not tell you why that is relevant to what you need to bet on getting the result you want here. For that, you will need to know a lot more. That’s what this book is about. We are going to show what else you have to have and how you set about finding it.”

In essence, Nancy Cartwright and Jeremy Hardie discuss how to get from “it worked there” to “it will work here”. This they describe as the “effectiveness” of a policy and is the sole focus of the book. They recognise that it is just one of the many factors, albeit a vital one, that determine policy decisions. Others include costs and benefits, available resources, alternative choices, ideology, and political expediency.

In examining whether it will work “here”, Cartwright and Hardie argue that one needs first to find the causal principles that link “there” with “here”. Then search for the support factors that played a positive causal role in making “it” happen “there”. The authors call this the “horizontal search”, which leads to asking whether these factors are present “here”. Next is the “vertical search” for the level of abstraction that will link “there” and “here” and so identify what will genuinely play a positive causal role “here”. Yes, as stated earlier, this book is a tough read and while I fear that my précis does thin justice to the process described in the book, my judgement is that it is exactly the kind of critical and analytical process that policymakers should engage in before rolling out social changes.

To help their argument Cartwright and Hardie use some powerful examples. Starting in 1985 the STAR project in Tennessee showed, as demonstrated by a randomized controlled trial, that students in the experiment’s smaller classes performed better at K-3 grade levels than did students in the larger classes. It also showed that minority and inner-city children gained two or three times as much from reduced class sizes as did their white and non-urban peers. Ten years later the state of California had problems with its early school grades finding itself at the bottom of the 39 states in the 1994 National Assessment of Education Progress. Reducing class sizes fitted with popular opinion, with common sense and the Tennessee RCT gave crucial evidence that it worked. In hindsight, of course, it worked “there”. California spent $1 billion, rising to $1.6 billion, on establishing half-size classes throughout the state within a year. But the positive results that were expected did not follow. Rigorous evaluation by 2002 found no conclusive link between reducing class size and the achievement of students. Moreover there was no improvement for disadvantaged children.

The Californian policymakers had not done an effective horizontal search. In Tennessee only schools that had available space to increase the number of classes were involved. In California, with so many schools involved, there was often insufficient spare space and so it was taken from other school activities – special needs, music and arts, athletics and child care programs. In Tennessee there was no shortage of qualified teachers to staff the reduced size classes, but in California an additional 12,000 teachers were hired quickly and many of these were unqualified. Moreover by limiting other school activities the policy had some negative effects on the school population.

Here is another example of unintended consequences. It may seem obvious that an isolated study space at home will improve a young person’s homework. But this presumes high motivation for homework. As Cartwright and Hardie point out, it may also be just what is needed to enable a badly motivated child to spend time texting her friends which she could not do if she were working in the same room as her family.

The UK Coalition government is introducing changes in the NHS, probation service, school education and elsewhere at breakneck speed and with little sign of evidence-based policy. Its “What Works” centres are being established too late. It’s a tragedy that this book wasn’t available when our current ministers were undergraduates. I recommend it to all who want to see policy improve social practice.

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Michael Bassey is an emeritus professor of Nottingham Trent University and an academician of the Academy of Social Sciences.  His methodological text Case Study Research in Educational Settings has sold over 5000 copies. Read more reviews by Michael.

Barack Obama is widely considered one of the most powerful and charismatic speakers of our age. In Articulate While Black, two scholars of Black language address language and racial politics in the U.S. through an insightful examination of President Obama’s language use–and America’s response to it. Articulate While Black will be indispensible to anyone interested in Barack Obama’s politically raced relationship to language, writes Zalfa Feghali.

Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman. Oxford University Press. October 2012.

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If there was ever any doubt that the United States has not in fact entered its fabled golden “postracial” age, H. Samy Alim and Geneva Smitherman‘s outstanding Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.Sdemolishes it. In this book, Alim and Smitherman, both distinguished linguists and experts in Black language and culture, argue that Barack Obama’s linguistic style-shifting is indicative of the United States’ continued inability to comprehend Black culture. This is a truly relevant book, its analysis running until just short of the 2012 US presidential election.

Alim and Smitherman focus on key moments in Obama’s candidacy and presidency to structure this study, interspersing close analysis of speech acts and events before moving to broader discussion of the implications of these acts within the field of Black language and communication. But what is genuinely most compelling about this book is the style and ease in which Alim and Smitherman present their argument; they are able to seamlessly move between Black vernacular speech (“one sista from Philly”) and more scholarly, academic prose in order to drive home their points about Obama’s effectiveness and style-shifting.

Connecting a wide range of material, such as Obama’s monophthongization of diphthongs (“Nah, we straight”) with the policing of Black language and the apparently impressive idea (to many white Americans) of being “articulate while black,” as well as “The Race Speech” and Obama’s linguistic relationship to the jeremiad and rappers such as Jay-Z and Young Jeezy, this book is more than convincing; it changes the terms with which many scholars of US culture will engage with the legacy of Obama’s presidency.

Chapter 4, “The Fist Bump Heard ‘Round the World: How Black Communication Becomes Controversial,” begins by recalling the moments after Obama secured the 2008 Democratic nomination for president of the United States. Alim and Smitherman convincingly argue that the ‘pound’ (or as much of the US press incorrectly termed “fist bump”) that the world witnessed between Barack and Michelle Obama was once again a gross misunderstanding of what they call “Black Folks 2.0.” After a brief overview of the press frenzy that followed this now famous ‘pound’, Alim and Smitherman skilfully move to an analysis of Black communication in the public sphere more generally, focusing on how the pound and the high-five have “crossed over” in what they (and Cornel West) call the process of AfroAmericanisation. However, the authors rightly note that even though these two (very specific) forms of non-verbal communication have become ‘recognizable’ to non-Black participants, there remains a cultural-linguistic gap in the case of verbal communication, which show “that rather than ‘postracial,’ America was and is a hyperracial society.” As evidence of this, Alim and Smitherman focus on the examples of the controversial terms nigga and muthafucka. This section of the chapter is genuinely interesting and informative, as the authors present the histories of both these terms to deliberately show how their ‘controversial’ nature “becomes controversial only in a society that deprecates Blackness.” Indeed, they conclude “if people continually deny this racially discriminatory context, mutual respect will prove to be elusive as a muthafucka.”

However, it is in chapter 6, “Change the Game: Language, Education, and the Cruel Fallout of Racism,” where Alim and Smitherman’s strongest contribution lies. Using their own fieldwork as evidence, they begin with the fairly uncontroversial premise that “[d]espite its grammatical complexity, the language of the Black child has been consistently viewed as something to eradicate, even by the most well-meaning teachers.” These teachers are primarily concerned with their students speaking “standard English” rather than “Black English,” which one teacher describes as “abrasive” and not “respectful.” Alim and Smitherman lament the fact that “despite the vitality of Black Language, teachers continue hearing what’s not said and missing what is” (reviewer’s emphasis). What becomes clear is that these teachers miss the stylistic flexibility that characterises Black language styles, which allow for a rich variety of verbal art games (for example). And what becomes painfully evident is that a fresh approach to teaching teachers the pedagogical potential of these “non-standard” language styles is urgently needed – an issue that could easily fill its own book, and is outside the remit of this one.

What follows instead is the authors’ own critical linguistic approach to language education, including exercises that allow students to develop an awareness of sociolinguistic variation through reflexive, ethnographic analyses. By providing high school students with the critical linguistic and ethnographic tools, Alim and Smitherman suggest that “we can stop apologizing for ‘the way things are’ and begin helping our students imagine the way things can be.” This allows students to think critically about “the relationships between language, racism, education, and power in society.” While this final chapter was certainly not short, and undoubtedly required the preceding chapters to be building blocks to synthesise, I found myself wishing this last chapter was its own book.

Articulate While Black will be indispensible to anyone interested in Barack Obama’s politically raced relationship to language, as well as those who may want to engage with a broader consideration of the relationship between language and race in the United States in recent years. It will certainly be on my ‘high-use’ bookshelf for the foreseeable future.

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Zalfa Feghali holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Nottingham for a thesis on the relationship between contemporary American and Canadian poetry, citizenship, and civic acts of reading. Her current research considers the role of the reader in the crafting of 9/11 novels. She is editorial assistant at the Journal of American Studies, and is on the Editorial Committee of the Open Library of the Humanities (www.openlibhums.org). She is an avid ukulele player and can be followed on twitter @zalface.

John O. McGinnis demonstrates how these new technologies combine to address a problem as old as democracy itself–how to help citizens better evaluate the consequences of their political choices. Ana Polo Alonso thinks you can support or dismiss his proposals, but you cannot deny that the author makes a major effort to bring forth ingenious measures to really ‘accelerate democracy.’

Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance through Technology. John O. McGinnis. Princeton University Press. December 2012.

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James Madison once wrote that “a popular government, without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both”. This quotation showcases that the strive for acquiring sound and reliable information to sustain political action is not a new one –actually, it proves it is as old as democracy itself, albeit it still remains a goal to be fully accomplished.

In order to fill up this historic “knowledge gap”, John O. McGinnis, the George C. Dix Professor of Constitutional Law at Northwestern University, proposes in his book Accelerating Democracy innovative measures to unleash the full potential of current technological breakthroughs with the aim of improving the way information is generated, gathered, and shared.

McGinnis believes that nowadays, in a world beset with incertitude, financial turmoil, and major historic challenges, it is imperative to spur shrewder policy deliberations. Therefore, he staunchly advocates for putting a major emphasis on empirical, fact-checked arguments instead of relying upon the raucous, parochial, quarreling –and often unsubstantiated—voices that vastly dominate current political debates.

To achieve this, he strongly supports the creation of a more favourable environment for information to flow smoothly –a scenario where researchers could more easily expose their findings to the general public, where policymakers could quickly acquire reliable information, and where citizens could become more knowledgeable about public issues at a greater speed.

Technological advancements, McGinnis posits, can make this scenario possible. As he exhaustively details, the steady increase in computer processing power now allows the storage of almost endless volumes of data, as well as the use of more sophisticated statistical and mathematical tools to analyse them. On the other hand, the Internet enormously facilitates the access to and the spread of new knowledge, while new media sites and online platforms dutifully aggregate information scattered through billions of websites, and makes it easy to digest.

Why then, McGinnis questions himself, are we not yet harnessing the full potential of these advances to raise the quality of political debates, enhance government efficiency, and improve policymaking?

In this book, McGinnis proposes innovative measures for government to embrace the opportunities that technological advancements offer. And it is important to underscore the word innovative here –-for while it is true that many efforts have been already deployed to achieve the same goal, and that thousands of books and academic papers are rife with proposals, they all tend to revolve around the same catalogue of recommendations. Hence the importance of Accelerating Democracy: it takes a step forward, and complements previous attempts with new ideas.

The most interesting idea –and often overlooked in books addressing the same issue– is undoubtedly the use of online political prediction markets to better forecast the consequences of any given policy proposal. This is an option that is currently illegal in the United States (authorities consider they don’t trade anything tangible), but the author considers that they should be, not only immediately legalise, but also promoted.

As McGinnis explains in great detail, political prediction markets are platforms that “allow the public to speculate on election and policy outcomes”. Based on the idea that James Surowiecki popularized in his 2004 best-selling The Wisdom of Crowds –- that a group of independently-thinking individuals can make better predictions than experts — McGinnis considers that these political prediction markets can aggregate vast sums of information from a vast array of individuals, and thus they can perfectly serve to assess “the likely effects of policies before they are implemented” (p. 60).

Although for many people this idea could seem like gambling on serious issues, the author is adamant in his praise of the multiple benefits of prediction markets: with a wide array of studies, he proves that they are very efficient, immune to manipulation, and that they can quickly incorporate new knowledge.

Just to single out one example, the already operating platforms that allow people to forecast the outcome of political contests have already demonstrated that these beneficial features are true. Take into account, for instance, Intrade, an Irish-based prediction market that famously and accurately forecasted the results of the presidential election in 2012. Or the IOWA Electronic Market, run by the University of Iowa for academic purposes only, and which has more accurately predicted elections than Gallup polls for decades.

Actually, as surprising as it might seem, recent scholarly studies agree with McGinnis’s view. In the last years, a lot of research has been conducted in order to test predictive market’s reliability and efficiency, and results so far almost overwhelmingly confirm both of them. For example, work done by Erik Snowberg (Caltech), Justin Wolfers (Wharton-UPenn), and Eric Zitzewitz (Dartmouth) has demonstrated that prediction markets exhibit lower statistical mistakes than professional polls.

Yet it is important to underscore that research also says that predictive markets are efficient and reliable only when a number of conditions concur (basically, when there is a great number of people operating). I am afraid that it is dubious that people would get interested in participating unless there is a much-vaunted event to gamble about (such an immediate presidential contest).

On the other hand, as some scholarly voices have already pointed out, these markets operate well when there are clearly-defined options (like option A and B), but nonetheless the reliability of predictive markets is still to be tested when there is no clear solution, and where optimal results are difficult to gauge.

With all their advantages and pitfalls, tough, one would have to agree with McGinnis that predictive markets should be taken into consideration.

Actually, we have to give him credit for widening the spectrum of technological possibilities. You can support or dismiss his proposals, but you cannot deny that the author makes a major effort to bring forth ingenious measures to really “accelerate democracy”. Thus, this provocative book is worth reading for everybody interested in improving policymaking, or all those willing to explore new ways to help citizens through a more efficient use of technology.

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Ana Polo Alonso is a speechwriter and political adviser. She holds a BSc in Political Science from the Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona), and a MA in Public Administration from Pompeu Fabra-ESADE. She also studied Marketing and Branding at the New York University, Project Management at Stanford, and specialized in Digital Marketing at Instituto de la Empresa (IE) Business School. Ana served as Responsible for Communications at the Women’s World Forum, and has collaborated with International Organizations to develop advocacy strategies. She was also Lecturer of Marketing at ESERP Business School, and taught Branding at the International MBA held at Staffordshire University-ESERP in Barcelona. She is currently finishing her first book, focused on the history of US Presidential campaigns. Read more reviews by Ana.

Since the beginning of commodity culture, products have been marketed with images reflecting racist concepts of otherness. Using the prominent examples of three companies – Uncle Ben’s, Sarotti and Banania – Malte Hinrichsen examines how racist trademark figures were established in the U.S., Germany and France and built on nation-specific processes of racial stereotyping. Bengi Bezirgan thinks this book might call the attention of anyone interested in various forms of racial exclusion.

Racist Trademarks: Slavery, Orient, Colonialism and Commodity Culture. Malte Hinrichsen. LIT Verlag. January 2013.

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Based on his award-winning dissertation, Malte Hinrichsen’s first book Racist Trademarks: Slavery, Orient, Colonialism and Commodity Culture is published as a part of the Racism Analysis research series on racial discrimination and its changing historical, ideological, and cultural patterns. As the name of the book suggests, Hinrichsen tracks the footprints of racist trademarks in advertising among different historical and contextual backgrounds. In order to indicate how racism and racial images are (re)produced and consumed within visual and discursive fields in commodity culture, the author examines Uncle Ben’s in the United States, Sarotti-Mohr in Germany, and Banania’s Tirailleur Sénégalais in France.

The motive for Hinrichsen’s selection of these three trademarks is their employment of both visual and discursive racial stereotypes of black figures in the advertising campaigns. From the outset, Hinrichsen discusses how a visual language of superiority developed in conjunction with slavery, Orientalism and colonialism. Consequently universal but at the same time distinct, practices of commodity racism appeared in the first half of the 20^th century. The trademark figures of Uncle Ben’s, Sarotti-Mohr and Banania were created in 1947, 1928 and 1915 respectively. Racialised advertising is considered as an exemplary field to grasp the specific histories of racial representations in each country.

Chapter 2, ‘Histories of Racial Stereotypes’, scrutinises the racial characteristics and racial stereotyping of these three figures, the promoted products and their connection to historical events by adopting comparative perspective. As a methodological concern, Hinrichsen underlines “the ambiguity of racial stereotyping” and its relevance for his study due to the alleged distinction between “positive” and “negative” stereotyping where the concept of “black” turns out to be a “packaging” term. He also touches upon the standpoint of white stereotyping as involving active subjects in the process of racialisation. More importantly, in the analysis of the evolution of ideas of race and racism along with (pseudo) scientific explanations, the shared mind-set about the Black “others” and also distinct national discourses are situated at the centre of the arguments throughout the study.

During the times of slavery and colonialism and orientalist ideas, the two-faced idea of armed “Others”-Africans- in US bears resemblance to European perception of Africans that are presented  as “either protective when kept in certain conditions or as a brutal criminal threatening white women” (p.37). Particularly the rape myth and sexualisation of black males in the United States, Germany, and France has led to the exoticizing of their otherness and attributes.  However, one interesting finding about these countries is that thanks to their common history of racial theories and hierarchies, the United States and France managed to integrate “inland blacks through their belittlement in popular culture” but Germany proceeded to regard them as “a symbol of exoticism and distance, available just to elites and nobility” (p.46).

Following this claim, Hinrichsen draws our attention to the linkage between the black characters in advertising for products such as chocolate, cocoa, and coffee, and identification of their consumption with the social class and status of the consumer in a society. He supports this well-known inference by elaborating the geographical and historical effects on the perceptions of products and their racial connotations. In other words, consumption of particular products stands for different symbolic meanings and suggests the social class and status of the consumer depending on the dominant European and U.S. views about racial hierarchy and their commodification processes. In this case, the interplay between race and consumption in the U.S. is different from its counterparts in Europe because Banania in France and Sarotti-Mohr in Germany were launched in the markets as “supposedly exotic products” based on existing colonial fantasies, but Uncle Ben signifies an “everyday commodity which, in a different way, can be associated with the colour of his skin” (p.56).

The importance of Chapter 3, ‘The Commodification of Racial Images’, lies in its capability to demonstrate theoretical discussions on the simultaneously increasing of commodity culture/racism and racialised advertising discourse. Hinrichsen also explains in this chapter how various roles are ascribed to “otherness” and racial stereotypes are utilised to increase exchange and perceived value of products. In addition, the author seeks to answer the illuminating question of “whether and to what extent the figures’ inherent racism contributed to the products’ success” (p.79). Although these three figures transmit different messages to the consumers in their respective societies, the U.S. has always influenced the black representations and racial trademark stereotypes and consumption patterns of racialised products in other countries. Therefore, Hinrichsen approves Larry Greene’s argument in his book chapter “Race in the Reich: The African American Press on Nazi Germany” that “the globalization of America’s home-grown racism” has direct effects on European racial imagery and market of racialised products. In this reviewer’s reading, the discussions on stereotypes, anti-racist, and anti-colonial movements since 20^th century in conjunction with the reactions of companies to the criticisms directed at their racial trademark figures constitute the most inspiring part of the third chapter. Even if Uncle Ben’s in United States, Sarotti-Mohr in Germany, and Banania’s Tirailleur Sénégalais in France were obliged to rearrange their marketing strategies, and both the physical traits and symbolic subtexts of their figures, their so-called modifications and adaptations to the changing settings would remain superficial. Unsurprisingly the modification of these three figures depending on the social circumstances was again founded on “recognition-value of the original characters” (p.97).

Overall Racist Trademarks is an insightful book that brings theoretical analyses of racism, colonialism, slavery, and Orientalism together in an exploration of three influential trademarks within a comparative historical perspective. Another attention-grabbing aspect of this book is the use of 54 visual materials that enable the reader to comprehend the author’s arguments easily and develop their own interpretations about the racialised figures in both visual and discursive ways. In the book, there are only five chapters including a short introduction and conclusion as well as bibliography. Chapter 2 and 3 cover the main topics and arguments accordingly offer compact information. Hinrichsen’s critical thinking would have been strengthened by addressing the discourses of cultural racism particularly in Europe and a more in-depth inquiry about the relation between the (re)construction of commodity culture and political developments in respective countries. This book might call the attention of anyone interested in various forms of racial exclusion regardless of the context and their interaction with commodity culture and consumer societies.

In his gripping (and breath-takingly graphic) early twentieth-century novel The Jungle, socialist Upton Sinclair chronicled the injustices of capitalistic meat packing practices in excruciating detail. The results of his Chicago-based, fictionalized portrayal of immigrants working in livestock factories speak for themselves, as Sinclair’s best-selling book made him perhaps the most famous activist in history to explicitly link food production with social justice (e.g. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character).

Although The Jungle inadvertently focussed the bulk of public attention on the importance of reforming food quality (rather than Sinclair’s desired emphasis on worker welfare standards), a movement was afoot and, to this day, the issue of holistically ‘socially just food’ (i.e., food that cares for people, the environment, and animals) continues to occupy the time of a wide arrange of academics and practitioners.

In California Cuisine and Just Food, the undeniable synergies between social justice and food are on full display as researchers Sally Fairfax, Louise Dyble, Greig Tor Guthey, and Lauren Gwin join forces with activists Monica Moore and Jennifer Sokolove to tackle the dirty worlds of industrial agriculture, confined animal raising, and poorly treated field workers. Collectively, they show that the unethical status quo is mutable by utilising a San Francisco Bay Area case study that draws out the complementarities between interconnected issues like food democracy, public health, agricultural sustainability, healthy food access, and workplace fairness. Any academic looking at food systems, sustainability, or natural resources would benefit from reading this book.

Professor Marion Nestle opens the tome with an important bit of sobering context – food production and food services in the United States alone are worth over a trillion dollars (with the total global value being several times this amount). It would be an understatement, therefore, to note that the entrenched barriers to more sustainable food systems will be difficult to push aside. The authors are certainly aware of the still-omnipresent, seemingly immovable hurdles and do not shy away from cataloguing them in-depth as they outline an exquisitely insightful historical overview of food organisations in California. Even though they emphasize some of the positive elements of food systems history, the entire first section of their work is mostly devoted to diligently chronicling the sordid racialisation, inegalitarianism, and government-industry collusion practices that define California-based food procurement. At times, the narrative even verges into the unbelievable – one section recounts that even ostensibly sacrosanct laws were not immune from revision, while other chapters highlight the stunning tactics used by big business to divide and marginalise any prospective farm worker unionisers that might unsettle enormous agribusiness profits.

The book’s most original contribution, however, comes in the analysis of food distribution patterns and food culture near San Francisco. This analysis is contained in latter sections, and stem from the authors’ extensive hands-on and academic knowledge of the region. The Bay Area has long been a veritable hub of food innovation, particularly in the organics domain and Fairfax et al. do an excellent job of drawing out the various components that comprise it. As these authors explain, the famous restaurant Chez Panisse is only the tip of the Bay Area’s more socially just food culture. From Oakland-based organic bakeries to ethical goat cheese farms, vegetable collectives to family milk operations, and community-conscious hospital institutions to organic free lunch programs engineered by enlightened school district meal planners, the book presents a vast array of opportunities that have been harnessed by actors, big and small, in highly creative ways.

What broader take-away messages can be gleaned from this volume? Two come instantly to mind. First, we need to revamp conventional food structures, scaling up elements of ‘privileged food’ (inter alia, living wages for workers, pesticide-free environments, and humane animal treatment) to make them the norm. It is unconscionable that the status quo – especially in the meat and dairy industries – revolves around the abuse and mistreatment of some of the most vulnerable and defenseless creatures among us. Growing global adoption of these regressive methods is undeniably worrisome, and efforts should be undertaken to reverse these trends by adopting many of the ideas contained in this text.

Second, the authors argue that we must search for solutions that accomplish multiple goals simultaneously. This very well could (and should) be the rallying cry of all future environmental activist efforts, as all transactions lead to distributive effects which dictate that certain actors will inevitably bear costs whenever an existing state of affairs is altered significantly. Accordingly, we need to present a viable alternative to conventional food production that placates as many of the potentially affected parties as much as possible while still remaining true to reasonable principles of progressivism, justice and fairness.

The authors of this book recount several valuable (but potentially unpalatable, at least in some circles) examples, ranging from for-profit urban agriculture to quasi-ethical beef to partial unionisation for farmworkers in select areas to finding clever ways to re-divert waste streams. All these examples beg a question; namely, how far do you go for the sake of compromise?  You must start somewhere, argue these pundits. This reviewer, for one, agrees whole-heartedly.

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Joel Krupa is an energy and environment researcher at the University of Toronto, studying under Dr. Danny Harvey. He was educated at Oxford. Read more reviews by Joel.