At the Global Health Advocacy Incubator, we know that every meal carries a story. That’s why we’re excited to share this end-of-year book list, featuring the books about food our Food and Nutrition team has on their nightstands. From deep dives into the global food system and trade policies to personal memoirs and cultural explorations, this reading list highlights the ways food connects us to health, policy and identity. So, as the year wraps up and you’re looking to cozy up with a good book, consider one of our recommendations!
Non-Fiction
Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic
Saabira Chaudhuri
“Consumed” reveals how global consumer giants like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Unilever used single-use plastics to fuel profit and fundamentally reshape modern life. Chaudhuri traces how disposability—sold to us as convenience—has become a dependency with deep consequences for our climate, biodiversity and health. By uncovering the forces behind this plastic takeover and the failed solutions that persist, the book empowers readers to demand real accountability and reclaim a future not defined by plastic.
Unrefined: How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar
David Singerman
“Unrefined” reveals how capitalism transformed sugar from a costly luxury into a ubiquitous global commodity, reshaping economies, labor systems, and everyday life. Singerman uncovers the hidden infrastructure—financial, political, and technological—that allowed powerful industries to control production and mask the true human and environmental costs of sugar. By exposing these long-overlooked forces, the book challenges readers to rethink the sweetness of modern capitalism and the systems that sustain it.
Food City: Four Centuries of Food-Making in New York
Joy Santlofer
“Food City” uncovers the hidden, four-century history of New York’s food production, from the first Dutch breweries to the rise of iconic brands. Santlofer shows how immigrant ingenuity and industrial innovation in bread, sugar and meat helped shape global trade, fuel wartime efforts and define the city’s cultural identity. By vividly recreating the sights, sounds, and tastes of a growing metropolis, the book reveals how food-making not only built New York but also influenced the nation.
Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
Michael Moss
In this book, Michael Moss unpacks the science and business strategies that large food corporations use to make processed foods addictive. “Salt Sugar Fat” reveals how ithose ingredients are engineered to hijack our taste buds and drive overconsumption, contributing to the global rise in obesity and diet-related diseases.
Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System
Raj Patel
“Stuffed and Starved” exposes the deep inequities of the global food system, where a handful of powerful corporations leave millions overfed on cheap calories while millions more go hungry. Patel traces how trade policies, corporate consolidation and political choices created a system that prioritizes profit over people, farmers and the planet. By weaving together stories from across the world, he reveals the human cost of this imbalance—and argues for a transformation that puts justice and dignity at the center of how we grow, distribute and eat food.
Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and Planet
Stuart Gillespie
“Food Fight” examines how today’s global food system—driven by powerful corporations, political interests and profit—has produced widespread malnutrition, environmental degradation and deep social inequities. Gillespie traces the historical and structural forces that turned food into a source of plunder rather than nourishment, revealing why so many reform efforts have failed. By spotlighting movements, policies and communities pushing for change, the book charts a path toward a food system that prioritizes people and the planet over profit.
Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico
Alyshia Gálvez
“Eating NAFTA” reveals how the trade agreement reshaped Mexico’s food systems, fueling a surge in ultra-processed foods, deepening health crises and undermining local agriculture. Gálvez shows how policy choices tied to globalization transformed what people eat and produce, with profound consequences for culture, livelihoods and public health. Bonus: Food and Nutrition team member Dr. Marisa Macari’s research is cited in the book.
Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind the Food That Isn’t Food
Chris van Tulleken
This book dives into the latest evidence to show how governments, scientists and doctors have allowed transnational food companies to create a pandemic of diet-related disease. The solutions don’t lie in willpower, personal responsibility or exercise. Instead, it focuses on the physiological and neurological effects of consuming ultra-processed foods, not just because of the food's nutritional profile, but due to how it is processed. The book offers solutions for individuals, doctors and policymakers to address this global issue.
The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor
Mark Schatzker
In this book, Schatzker reveals how modern food production has stripped real food of its natural flavors. As food becomes increasingly bland, a multibillion-dollar industry adds artificial flavorings to ultra-processed foods to make them delicious again, tricking our senses into thinking they are nutritious and more satisfying than they are. This book examines the disconnect between nutrition and flavor, and how the added flavorings create an "incentive to eat" that drives overconsumption.
Fiction
Black Cake
Charmaine Wilkerson
In present-day California, Eleanor Bennett leaves her children, Byron and Benny, a black cake made from a cherished family recipe and a voice recording that reshapes their understanding of who they are. As they follow the trail of Eleanor’s revelations, the black cake becomes more than an inheritance; it becomes the key to uncovering their mother’s hidden past and reclaiming their own fractured sense of family and identity.
Crying in H Mart
Michelle Zauner
In this memoir, food is the conduit for memory, connection and grief. Michelle Zauner’s meals with her mother—whether in their home in Oregon or late-night feasts in her grandmother’s Seoul apartment—become acts of love, cultural inheritance and intimate bonding. Through these shared dishes, Zauner confronts loss, navigates her identity and carries forward the emotional and familial ties that endure beyond her mother’s death.
A Place for Us
Fatima Farheen Mirza
As an Indian wedding brings the family back together, Rafiq and Layla must reckon with the choices their children have made. The story spans from the parents’ arrival in America to the years their children navigate between two cultures, searching for their place in the world and a path home. Throughout, food quietly carries the family’s heritage, linking their past in India to their life in America.