Feeding the Future: Restoring the Planet and Healing Ourselves

A radical reframing of the current global food system to address injustices and existential threats

The global food system stands at a critical juncture. Food production is among the largest causes of global environmental change and accelerating climate change. The resulting loss of biodiversity and the harmful effects on water and land use have put human life at risk. To date, proposed solutions have downplayed the stakes and ignored the complex social justice and ecological dimensions of these challenges.

Feeding the Future offers a radical reframing of how humanity can address the harmful effects and injustices of the current global food system. Rather than pursuing an impossible transformation of the entire system, Nicole Negowetti reveals how communities worldwide are transcending it through innovative, place-based solutions. Through vivid storytelling and rigorous analysis, she challenges conventional approaches to solving food system problems that are being advanced by agribusiness, the food industry, policymakers, and many nongovernmental organizations. She shares the stories of visionary changemakers and communities around the world that are applying innovative, unique strategies to bring depleted agricultural lands back to life, revitalize urban neighborhoods, establish new economic models, and create thriving regional food systems.

For policymakers, activists, scholars, and anyone concerned about the connections between food systems, people’s health, and the planet’s fate, Feeding the Future offers practical pathways forward. By showing how local communities are already building successful alternatives to industrial agriculture, Negowetti offers a compelling blueprint for transforming the existing global food system.

Nicole Negowetti is a visiting lecturer at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy of Tufts University, where she teaches food law and regulation. She also serves on the United Nations Development Program’s Conscious Food Systems Alliance. She previously held key roles at the Plant Based Foods Association and Institute and at Harvard Law School.