About this item
A Fast Food Nation for the foods we grow and depend onThe bananas we eat today aren't your parents' bananas: We eat a recognizable, consistent breakfast fruit that was standardized in the 1960s from dozens into one basic banana. But because of that, the banana we love is dangerously susceptible to a pathogen that might wipe them out.That's the story of our food today: Modern science has brought us produce in perpetual abundance-once-rare fruits are seemingly never out of season, and we breed and clone the hardiest, best-tasting varieties of the crops we rely on most. As a result, a smaller proportion of people on earth go hungry today than at any other moment in the last thousand years, and the streamlining of our food supply guarantees that the food we buy, from bananas to coffee to wheat, tastes the same every single time.Our corporate food system has nearly perfected the process of turning sunlight, water and nutrients into food. But our crops themselves remain susceptible to the nature's fury. And nature always wins.Authoritative, urgent, and filled with fascinating heroes and villains from around the world, Never Out of Season is the story of the crops we depend on most and the scientists racing to preserve the diversity of life, in order to save our food supply, and us.
About the Author
Robert Dunn is a writer, teacher, and musician.His novels include The Sting Rays, Pink Cadillac (chosen as a Book Sense pick in 2002), Cutting Time: a Novel of the Blues, Soul Cavalcade, Meet the Annas, and Look at Flower (which Wavy Gravy digs!). An excerpt from Pink Cadillac appeared in The Best in Rock Fiction (Hal Leonard, 2005). Another musical story, Bo Diddley, is in the anthology The Best Underground Fiction (Stolen Time Publishing, 2006).He has finished a new novel, Stations of the Cross, to be published in June 2013.For the last years of the writer Bernard Malamud's life, Dunn was his personal assistant.He's also published widely, including an O. Henry Prize-winning story, as well as fiction in The Atlantic, Redbook, Omni, and numerous literary journals, a poem in The New Yorker, and a front-page essay in the New York Times Book Review. Years ago he worked for The New Yorker magazine, and he taught at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa.For the past 25 years Dunn has taught fiction writing at The New School in New York City. He also works for Sports Illustrated magazine as a copyeditor.As a musician, Dunn is the founder of the musical group Thin Wild Mercury, as well as its guitar player and principal songwriter. The group is on hiatus now, but in the past they've played often around New York City, including regularly at Arlene's Grocery and CB's Gallery.Dunn is married to a set designer/art director and lives in New York City.Find out more at www.robertdunn.net, including music tracks and info on new novels.
