Debates about food are often about much more than nutrition and health, as it is with the three books reviewed here, written by Michael Pollan, Carolyn Steel and Raj Patel. Each of these authors examines the present food system in different but complementary ways. Pollan focuses on the dysfunctional nature of the United States' (US) food system while Patel examines how the US food system, with its economic power, influences food and nutrition across the planet. Steel focuses on the United Kingdom (UK) and the global links in food production and consumption that British colonialism created, and which have persisted to the present day. Pollan takes a hard look at the flaws and contradictions in the US food system and the social and health problems that stem from it. His now well-known normative dictum on what humans should eat to be healthy is worth restating: ‘Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.’ Food is not what most Americans eat, however. Mostly they consume food products, which are developed from plant sources in increasingly dizzying array. The plant sources in question are predominantly cereal crops that are extremely processed, depleted of micronutrients and dietary fibre, and concentrated in energy content. These are not the plants that Pollan thinks should be eaten; rather we should be eating micronutrient-rich fruits and vegetables. The application of nutrition science to industrial food production (something that Pollan calls nutritionism) has led to nutritionally depleted food products that are repleted with industrially produced micronutrients. This of course is good for business, and the business of America is business. Poor nutritional health is the collateral damage to the US population from business as usual, however that Americans eat too much of what they eat is visible from the ever-growing rates of obesity, in which the nation is a clear champion among industrialized nations. Deviation from Pollan's normative dictum has led to the public health disaster of obesity and chronic disease, especially in the US, and also across much of the industrialized world.

Despite his damning account, Pollan is optimistic. He calls for a return to value-laden eating. That is, social value, not economic value: eating, rather than consuming. The distinction between eating and consuming is an important one. As the US has led the world in consumer capitalism, fast food and industrialized food products retailed in large supermarkets have become the principal forms of feeding the American masses. In this context, Americans have embraced food consumption. Pollan contrasts the French, who spend much time eating and discussing tiny servings of food, with Americans, who prefer to consume in large quantity, and discuss what they should avoid eating. Pollan also points out that while the French enjoy their food, Americans exhibit anxieties about it. The French have the ability to extract more food experience from fewer calories than Americans, and this may be one reason why they are generally slimmer and healthier. Pollan exhorts his readers to pay more, and eat less; to eat meals with each other, rather than snack in solitary fashion; to eat at a table, not while walking, working, or watching television; not to treat food as fuel, and not to buy it from the same place that they fuel their cars; to eat slowly; to cook; and if possible, plant a garden, even a very small one. These simple rules would do more than make Americans healthy; they would favour local producers of food, reconnect people with each other, reduce consumption of high energy-dense foods, increase food literacy and re-engage American society with nature. Of course, most Americans live in cities and supplying food to urban populations requires systems of production and distribution. The sheer efficiency of the US food system has been very successful in feeding people in industrial fashion, mostly with refined carbohydrates and fats. But Pollan shows that by focusing on food energy rather than food quality, a series of problems have emerged – ones for which there is no single quick fix.

Systems of food production and distribution are also central to Carolyn Steel's Hungry City. In this book she focuses on London, describing it through the food needed to feed its citizens across the ages, and its production within the UK and globally. The British Empire was run from London, and the trading and commodity links it established persist to the present day. Steel shows how food and its provision is linked to a range of broader issues: most closely to obesity, nutrition and chronic and infectious diseases, but also to peak oil, climate change, sustainability, pollution and inequality. Her book deals in turn with farming, food transport, shopping, cooking, eating and waste, examining how each affects our lives and has impact on the world in which we live. From the origins of agriculture to the development of the first cities, from the growth of empires to globalization, Steel's vision is broad. She describes food production, from small-scale agriculture for supply to local markets, to globalized production and distribution by vast transnational conglomerates.

The third book – Raj Patel's Stuffed & Starved – is broad of vision, but in a different manner to Steel's book. Patel examines some of the ways that the world food system has been shaped by governments and corporations, but also by producers, consumers and activists. The way that the world food system is configured, he argues, has left many people at the extremes of it either obese or undernourished. Patel examines the forces that have led to this, and how they have destroyed rural communities across the world, accelerating rural-to-urban migration (particularly in the developing world) and reliance on industrial food production. Trade agreements helped to shape the global food system after the Second World War, and Patel examines the damage they have done with the example of the adoption of soya bean cultivation and processing by the Brazilian government. The adoption of soya bean cultivation was largely as an export commodity, but also to help meet food consumption needs of the Brazilian population directly, through soya oil production, and indirectly through soya-based animal feed. While the initiative was successful in meeting its aims, there were significant costs attached to it, including extensive displacement of local populations, deforestation and increased economic inequality. Speaking globally, Patel describes how the ‘supermarketization’ of food delivery has furthered the industrialization of the food system, and contributed to economic inequality and delocalization of food production.

All three authors show how supermarket dominance of food supply in industrialized nations operates in a global environment, abolishing seasonality in food availability and increasing food miles and the energy consumed in transporting food. All three show how it has helped make food products (usually things containing cereals, fats and sugar, constituted in many different ways) cheaper than ever before, at a price to human health. The authors of all three books show how supermarket dominance has seen the growth of cathedrals devoted to food retail, most of which can only be reached by car. By locating major supermarkets on the edges of cities, they have sucked much of the economic life out of city centres. All three authors agree about the craziness of the present Western food system, and the unsustainable way in which we obtain and consume food now.

The final chapters of all three books suggest possible ways in which the food system could be redirected towards healthier, sustainable, equitable and sensible goals. They vary for the three authors from the small-scale and practical, to the large-scale and utopian. Pollan has some commonsense commandments stemming from his well-known dictum stated earlier. Patel echoes Pollan. He calls us to: transform our tastes, to wean ourselves off processed and energy-dense foods and to eat locally and seasonally. He also calls us to eat food that is produced in harmony with the local environment. He seeks more far-reaching changes, including redistribution of resources and reduction of inequality among those working on the land and in food production, as well as ending agricultural policies (such as the Farm Bill in the US, and the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union) that subsidize industrial farming. Steel presents a utopian view of how we might use food to rethink the design and structure of cities. All three highlight what a strange food world the West lives in now, and how it might be made better. All three books are very readable, and I recommend them all to anybody interested in food systems. They give complementary analyses, do not contradict each other and have important messages. The most important of these is that food is too important to take for granted.