Showing titles in Agricultural & Food Sciences

As Serious Eats's culinary nerd-in-residence, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has pondered all these questions and more. Kenji shows that often, conventional methods don't work that well, and home cooks can achieve far better results using new - but simple - techniques. In hundreds of easy-to-make recipes, you will find out how to make foolproof Hollandaise sauce in just two minutes, how to transform one simple tomato sauce into a half dozen dishes, how to make the crispiest, creamiest potato casserole ever conceived, and much more.

To grow produce of the highest nutritional quality the essential minerals lacking in our soil must be replaced, but this re-mineralization calls for far more attention to detail than the simple addition of composted manure or NPK fertilizers. The Intelligent Gardener demystifies the process, while simultaneously debunking much of the false and misleading information perpetuated by both the conventional and organic agricultural movements. In doing so, it conclusively establishes the link between healthy soil, healthy food, and healthy people.

Easy beekeeping for new-bees. Wouldn’t it be great to raise your own bees, have a fresh supply of honey, and bring thousands of healthy pollinators into your yard? Beekeeping for Beginners is a simple, step-by-step guide that helps you learn the fundamentals of modern beekeeping. You (and your bees) will be buzzing with delight. From picking the right hive and bringing your bees home to surviving winter and collecting honey, experienced beekeeper Amber Bradshaw takes you on an easy-to-follow journey through your first year of beekeeping and beyond.

For listeners who enjoyed Finding the Mother Tree and The Hidden Life of Trees comes the first-ever book about a movement to restore biodiversity in our cities and towns by transforming empty lots, backyards, and degraded land into mini-forests. Author Hannah Lewis is the forest maker turning asphalt into ecosystems to save the planet, and she wants everyone to know they can do it too.

The problem of agriculture is as old as civilization. Throughout history, great societies that abused their land withered into poverty or disappeared entirely. Now we risk repeating this ancient story on a global scale due to ongoing soil degradation, a changing climate, and a rising population. But there is reason for hope. David R. Montgomery introduces us to farmers around the world at the heart of a brewing soil health revolution that could bring humanity's ailing soil back to life remarkably fast.

Humans have been farming for thousands of years, and yet agriculture has undergone more fundamental changes in the past 80 years than in the previous several centuries. In 1900, 30 million American farmers tilled the soil or tended livestock; today there are fewer than 4.5 million farmers who feed a population four times larger than it was at the beginning of the century.

Medicine has become inhuman, to disastrous effect. The doctor-patient relationship - the heart of medicine - is broken: doctors are too distracted and overwhelmed to truly connect with their patients, and medical errors and misdiagnoses abound. In Deep Medicine, leading physician Eric Topol reveals how artificial intelligence can help. AI has the potential to transform everything doctors do, from notetaking and medical scans to diagnosis and treatment, greatly cutting down the cost of medicine and reducing human mortality.

Have you ever wondered how peas, kale, asparagus, beans, squash, and corn have ended up on our plates? Well, Adam Alexander has. In The Seed Detective, Adam shares his own stories of seed hunting, with the origin stories behind many of our everyday food heroes. Taking us on a journey that began when we left the life of the hunter-gatherer to become farmers, he tells tales of globalization, political intrigue, colonization, and serendipity—describing how these vegetables and their travels have become embedded in our food cultures.

Growing Food God’s Way is a compelling biography of accomplished gardener and arborist Paul Gautschi. Known world-wide for his connection with God’s world of nature from the viral documrntary: Back to Eden. This authorized work explores the man and his wildly successful garden and orchard…while applying revealed principles to guide our daily lives as well. This is not a book about gardening, it is a book about life and wisdom, as experienced by Paul and many others. Home gardeners in 208 countries agree that you can grow better produce with much less cost and less work if you do it ...

The inspiration for the BBC series of the same name. Fresh out of Glasgow Veterinary College, to the young James Herriot 1930s Yorkshire seems to offer an idyllic pocket of rural life in a rapidly changing world. But from his erratic new colleagues, brothers Siegfried and Tristan Farnon, to incomprehensible farmers, herds of semiferal cattle, a pig called Nugent and an overweight Pekingese called Tricki Woo, James find he is on a learning curve as steep as the hills around him.

This book really is for the absolute beginner. We'll cover all the basics in a motivating, easy-to-digest way, and allow nature to do the heavy lifting. We'll discover your green thumb that's been there all along. We'll take good care of our fellow human and our planet. And we'll have a lot of fun doing it! Friend, you really can live the dream, and make it your reality. It all starts with one step.

In Formerly Known as Food, Kristin Lawless argues that, because of the degradation of our diet, our bodies are literally changing from the inside out. The billion-dollar food industry is reshaping our food preferences, altering our brains, changing the composition of our microbiota, and even affecting the expression of our genes. Lawless chronicles how this is happening and what it means for our bodies, health, and survival. An independent journalist and nutrition expert, Lawless is emerging as the voice of a new generation of food thinkers.

In March of 2009, Erin Byers Murray ditched her pampered city-girl lifestyle and convinced the rowdy and mostly male crew at Island Creek Oysters in Duxbury, Massachusetts, to let a completely unprepared, aquaculture-illiterate food-and-lifestyle writer work for them for a year to learn the business of oysters. The result is Shucked - part love letter, part memoir, and part documentary about the world's most beloved bivalves.

Ever wonder if plants sleep or why their leaves are shaped a certain way? The inner workings of the plants you love are revealed and celebrated in this guide by botany expert Dr. Scott Zona. A Gardener’s Guide to Botany is not just another book on how to grow plants. Instead, it’s a botanical journey into what makes plants tick, delivered in layman’s terms that are easily understood and appreciated by both advanced gardeners and first-timers. It’s the chlorophyll-infused science behind the plants you know and love, whether you grow them indoors or out.

Cheese puffs. Coffee. Sunscreen. Vapes. George Zaidan reveals what will kill you, what won’t, and why - explained with high-octane hilarity, hysterical hijinks, and other things that don’t begin with the letter H. Ingredients offers the perspective of a chemist on the stuff we eat, drink, inhale, and smear on ourselves. Apart from the burning question of whether you should eat that Cheeto, Zaidan explores a range of topics.

Can you describe how the flavor of halibut differs from red snapper? How Brie differs from cheddar? For most of us, unfortunately, the answer is: badly. Flavor remains a vague, undeveloped concept we don't know enough about to describe - or to appreciate - fully. In Flavor, Bob Holmes shows us just how much we're missing. He tackles questions like why cake tastes sweetest on white plates, how wine experts' eyes fool their noses, and how language affects flavor.

A rich, sweeping, and compelling work of botanical history, The Cabaret of Plants explores dozens of plant species that for millennia have challenged our imaginations, awoken our wonder, and upturned our ideas about history, science, beauty, and belief. Going back to the beginnings of human history, Richard Mabey shows how flowers, trees, and plants have been central to human experience not just as sources of food and medicine but as objects of worship, actors in creation myths, and symbols of war and peace, life and death.

When Charles and Perrine Hervé-Gruyer set out to create their farm in an historic Normandy village, they had no idea just how much their lives would change. Neither one had ever farmed before. Charles had been circumnavigating the globe by sail, operating a floating school that taught students about ecology and indigenous cultures. Perrine had been an international lawyer in Japan. Each had returned to France to start a new life.

Beware! The sordid lives of plants behaving badly. A tree that sheds poison daggers; a glistening red seed that stops the heart; a shrub that causes paralysis; a vine that strangles; and a leaf that triggered a war. Amy Stewart, best-selling author of Flower Confidential, takes on over two hundred of Mother Nature's most appalling creations in an A to Z of plants that kill, maim, intoxicate, and otherwise offend.

From ancient empires to modern economics, veteran journalist Andrew Lawler delivers a sweeping history of the animal that has been most crucial to the spread of civilization across the globe: the chicken. Queen Victoria was obsessed with it. Socrates' last words were about it. Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur made their scientific breakthroughs using it. Catholic popes, African shamans, Chinese philosophers, and Muslim mystics praised it.