McGann has written a lucid, informative, and persuasive volume on sacramental ethics that would make a fine resource in an undergraduate course or adult discussion group on the Eucharist, Catholic or Christian social thought, or global hunger. In this text McGann calls upon her audience to recognize an unfolding global food crisis as flowing from the rise of an industrial agricultural system and to respond to this threat by turning to a reinvigorated eucharistic practice and ethic. These flow from the revolutionary and radical table fellowship modeled by Jesus and taken up by the early Christian community.

In part 1 of the book, McGann makes good use of current sociological and biblical scholarship, first to describe the human import and meaning of eating in general and shared meals in particular, and then to show the ways Jesus and early Christian communities used radically inclusive shared meals to challenge and reform unjust imperial and hierarchical practices and structures. McGann makes a strong case here that food ties us to others in profound, pervasive, and unavoidable ways. She insists that how we recognize, respond to, and structure the local and global networks in which eating immerses us deeply affects ourselves and our world for the better or worse. In this way she establishes that we need to see the radical and inclusive table fellowship of Jesus and early Christians as embodying a social vision and practice challenging both historical and contemporary structures.

In the second part of her text, McGann offers a detailed but highly accessible description and analysis of the rise and harms of modern industrial agriculture. She underscores how its contributions to a contemporary global food crisis come with profound human and ecological costs. In broad but clear strokes, she outlines the major elements of the sudden and intentional development of corporate agriculture in the United States and around the world over the past seventy years, and identifies the ways this shift has concentrated wealth and power in the hands of a shrinking number of corporations while it disenfranchizes and disempowers most farmers, thereby increasing hunger and destroying farmlands. In chapters dealing with the human and ecological costs of industrial agriculture, McGann details the ways this system contributes to human hunger and worsens the conditions of farmworkers around the world. These same chapters include instructive descriptions of important harms to soil and seeds wrecked by corporate farming, and they illustrate the essential roles and vulnerability of both of these often overlooked staples of our daily bread. But McGann does not just lay out the case against industrial farming. She also offers a clear and creative description of the central elements of a regenerative approach to agriculture committed to providing everyone with good, safe, and affordable food produced in a just and sustainable manner.

The final part of the book describes both how the biblical vision and practice of shared eucharistic meals found in the radical table fellowship of Jesus and the inclusive tables of early Christian communities might be employed to address and transform the problems with modern industrial agriculture. She suggests how we might reimagine and reform our own contemporary eucharistic liturgical practice to make the radical inclusivity and justice embedded in the Eucharist come alive and empower us to build a more just and humane global food system.

There are three reasons to recommend this book as an undergraduate text: first, McGann's text offers a clear and accessible description of the authentic meaning of eating and sharing meals as practices meant to connect us with humanity and creation; second, it uncovers the dysfunctional and destructive ways we eat inside a global industrial food system, and third, it holds up eucharistic eating as a way of reconnecting to others and our planet. Throughout the text McGann makes repeated connections between the problematic elements of our industrial food system and the corrective insights that could be provided by an authentic eucharistic vision and practice. In each of the book's chapters, McGann provides readers with helpful discussion questions that would enable students to unpack and explore the insights of the text.