Food Choice and Sustainability: Why Buying Local, Eating Less Meat, and Taking Baby Steps Won't Work

Reviewed by Kayti Nika Raet for Readers' Favorite
Food Choice and Sustainability, by Dr. Richard Oppenlander, is a non-fiction tome with the proactive subtitle: Why buying local, eating less meat, and taking baby steps won't work. As Dr. Richard Oppenlander states in the preface, Food Choice and Sustainability is “not about what to eat, it's about accurately defining 'sustainability' as it relates to food choices and making a fundamental change in our lives to better achieve it.”
While the modern movement to reverse global warming is mostly focused on things like changing out light bulbs or using ethanol to power more energy efficient cars, Dr. Richard Oppenlander points out that our largely animal-based diet does more to strip the Earth of finite resources and expand our carbon footprint that any gas-guzzler currently on the market. He encourages us to stop using the term 'sustainability' in a short-sighted manner and to encompass a larger range of issues that include both plants and animals. Dr. Oppenlander doesn't settle for any easy answers or pat solutions but, while I could sense that he was passionate about his subject and found myself agreeing with many of his points, Food Choice and Sustainability makes for rather dry reading. It lacked the punch of other social-conscious works such as Waiting for Superman, An Inconvenient Truth, or Fast-Food Nation, which is unfortunate because the information is very good and is one that needs to be spread.