Food Matters explores central questions around the seemingly simple topic of food: what is food, exactly? Do we eat for sustenance, for health, for pleasure? Where does our food come from, and why should we care? What does it mean to eat ethically? Readings by a range of essayists, scientists, health researchers, philosophers, reporters, artists, and ordinary citizens take up these questions and more. Questions after each reading provide a range of activities for students. The Web site for the Spotlight Series offers comprehensive instructor support with sample syllabi and additional teaching resources.

The Bedford Spotlight Reader Series is an exciting new line of single-theme readers, each featuring Bedford’s trademark care and quality. The readers in the series collect carefully chosen readings sufficient for an entire writing course—about 30 selections—to allow instructors to provide carefully developed, high-quality instruction at an affordable price. Bedford Spotlight Readers are designed to help students make inquiries from multiple perspectives, opening up topics such as money, food, sustainability, and gender to critical analysis. The readers are flexibly arranged in thematic chapters, each focusing in depth on a different facet of the central topic. An Editorial Board of more than dozen compositionists at schools focusing on specific themes have assisted in the development of the series.

1. What Is Food?

Michael Pollan, Eat Food: Food Defined

Eric Schlosser, Why the Fries Taste So Good

Jill McCorkle, Her Chee-to Heart

Camille Kingsolver, Taking Local On the Road

Lily Wong, Eating the Hyphen

Amy Cyrex Sins, Doberge Cake after Katrina

Jordan Shapiro, The Eco-Gastronomic Mirror: Narcissism and Death at the Dinner Table

2. What Is The Purpose of Food?

Wendell Berry, The Pleasures of Eating

Marion Nestle, Eating Made Simple

Bryant Terry, Reclaiming True Grits

Masanobu Fukuoka, Living by Bread Alone

Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio, What the World Eats

Erica Strauss, Zombies vs. The Joy of Canning

Idov, Michael. When Did Young People Start Spending 25% of Their Paychecks on Pickled Lamb’s Tongues?

3. What Determines What We Eat?

United States Department of Agriculture, Food Pyramid and Food Plate Nutritional Guidelines

Michelle Obama, Michelle. Excerpt from American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America

Brian Wansink and Collin R. Payne, The Joy of Cooking Too Much: 70 Years of Calorie Increases in Classic Recipes

James Surowiecki, Downsizing Supersize

Dhruv Khullar, Why Shame Won’t Stop Obesity

Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, Monsanto’s Harvest of Fear

Vandana Shiva, Soy Imperialism and the Destruction of Local Food Cultures

Gary Paul Nabhan, A Brief History of Cross-Border Food Trade

4. What Does It Mean to Eat Ethically?

Margaret Mead, The Changing Significance of Food

Peter Singer, Equality for Animals

Barbara Kingsolver, You Can’t Run Away on Harvest Day

Gary Steiner, Animal, Vegetable, Miserable

Bill McKibben, The Only Way to Have a Cow

Blake Hurst, The Omnivore’s Delusion: Against the Agri-intellectuals

Sally Kohn, Do Foodies Care about Workers?

5. What Is The Future of Food?

Prince Charles of Wales, On the Future of Food

David Biello, Will Organic Food Fail to Feed the World?

Eliot Coleman, Beyond Organic

Robert Paarlberg, Attention Whole Foods Shoppers

Frances Moore Lappé, Biotechnology Isn’t the Key to Feeding the World

Natasha Bowens, Brightening Up the Dark Farming History of the Sunshine State

Jennifer Cockrall-King, Chicago: The Vertical Farm