Raw Deal

July 1, 2022

From the 1970s to 2020, when Cecchi-Azzolina proclaimed Your Table Is Ready, he meant it; he was ma�tre d' for sparkly New York restaurants like River Caf�, Minetta Tavern, and Le Coucou (50,000-copy first printing). Critic, journalist, and author of the National Book Award finalist Lifting as We Climb, Dionne uses personal experience--from harassment to health issues--to plumb issues of size, race, and gender in Weightless (100,000-copy first printing). A vending-machine entrepreneur by age nine now famed for TikTok's Her First $100K, Dunlap was surprised to learn in college how many female friends lacked money-management skills and now seeks to bring out the Financial Feminist in every woman (100,000-copy first printing). Following nine sometimes glamorous, sometimes painful decades and publication of the New York Times best-selling memoir Lady in Waiting, Glenconner asks Whatever Next, then delivers lessons learned while living in proximity to the Crown (50,000-copy first printing). In Why We Meditate, internationally best-selling author Goleman (Emotional Intelligence) and Tibetan Buddhist meditation master Rinpoche join forces to explain why and how meditation can help practitioners push back destructive emotions. In Screaming on the Inside, New York Times opinion writer Grose examines 200 years of unrealistic, even morally questionable parenting expectations to reveal the damage done to generations of mothers in particular (100,000-copy first printing). In Smitten Kitchen Keepers, her much anticipated third book, star food blogger Perelman tests and retests classics to offer failproof recipes for cheddar broccoli quiche, lemon poppy seed cake, and more. Quilter's Hatching draws on both reportage and personal experience to explore the impact of assisted reproductive technology today. From Forbes staffer Sorvino, Raw Deal details the current crisis facing the U.S. meat industry, flailing after consolidation, price fixing, and supply-chain issues even as alternative meat producers emerge.

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September 12, 2022
Forbes journalist Sorvino debuts with an in-depth study of the forces roiling the meat industry. Though the Covid-19 pandemic stoked fears of a nationwide meat shortage, Sorvino argues the problem goes back nearly 50 years. In the 1970s, the USDA subsidized agribusiness in America, stacking the odds against small-scale operations, and a wave of consolidation that began in the 1980s has resulted in a handful of companies controlling most of the beef, poultry, and pork industries. Soaring profits at Cargill, Tyson, JBS, and other conglomerates went to stock buybacks and corporate acquisitions, however, leaving plant workers to perform one of the most dangerous jobs in America for paltry wages. Sorvino also examines growing concerns over animal welfare and the environment, documents the challenges facing meat alternatives, and profiles activists including bison rancher Lucille Contreras, a member of the Lipan Apache Band of Texas whose Texas Tribal Buffalo Project “educates on healthy foods made using Indigenous techniques.” Ultimately, Sorvino advocates for “a patchwork of systems that prioritize communities and strengthen access to more nutritious, sustainably produced foods.” Though the book’s arcane legal and financial discussions are best suited to those with a background in the subject, this is a deeply informed and eye-opening call for change.

November 1, 2022
A new expos� of the American meat industry. Since Upton Sinclair's 1906 bestseller, The Jungle, denunciations of the meat industry appear regularly, and they remain fully justified. A simple description of what happens when an animal enters a slaughterhouse will horrify most readers, and equally time-honored are journalists' depictions of low-wage slaughterhouse work, which is gruesome, dangerous, and unhealthy. Sorvino, who runs the coverage of food, drink, and agriculture at Forbes, does not ignore these easy marks, but she aims higher, targeting multinational corporations, billionaires, global trade, climate change, soil destruction, and pollution. "Meat production has been a staple of the American economy, culture, and diet for generations," she writes, "but industrial agriculture that values profits over people and the environment is careening toward a food-insecure future." American farmers and meat processors benefit from government subsidies and tax breaks, but their profits are a result of their cruel, assembly-line efficiency in factory farms or titanic feedlots, where the animals consume hyperdense feed, chemicals, and antibiotics to boost their weight before slaughter. Research reveals strong evidence that processed food, including bacon, ham, hot dogs, and salami, can cause cancer. Readers will gnash their teeth at Sorvino's vivid accounts of rapacious billionaires and the half-dozen mega-corporations that dominate the industry, pollute waterways, and exhaust farmland under the very gentle hand of government regulators. In the final section, the author explores a few solutions, but she is skeptical that alternative protein will ever upend traditional industrial systems. She describes a dozen entrepreneurs and their protein alternatives, but "meat alternatives accounted for 0.2 percent of 2020 grocery meat sales." Money is rarely their main problem because this is a trendy field for venture capitalists (even the industry giants are researching this area), but investors nearly always value profit over saving the environment, and many of their products are far from organic, requiring industrial farmed inputs, chemicals, and pesticides. Convincing, often enraging, and no more optimistic than the facts call for.

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