Lynn Matluck Brooks's "Theatres of the Body"

Lynn Matluck Brooks is Arthur and Katherine Shadek Humanities Professor, Emerita at Franklin & Marshall College. She is the author of John Durang: Man of the American Stage, The Art of Dancing in Seventeenth-Century Spain: Juan de Esquivel Navarro and His World, and The Dances of the Processions of Seville in Spain's Golden Age, and the editor of Women’s Work: Making Dance in Europe before 1800. She was editor of Dance Research Journal, Dance Chronicle, and thINKingDANCE.org.

Brooks applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Theatres of the Body: Dance and Discourse in Antebellum Philadelphia, and reported the following:

Page 99 proves a surprisingly good place to grasp my book’s themes and methods. In fact, the structural midpoint of the book’s text lands on page 99, which opens chapter 4 of the book’s six chapters. Chapter 4, “Dancing ‘Philadelphia in Slices’ — The 1840s,” introduces the literary discourses that engaged dance, with authors “reporting, puffing, critiquing, condemning,” and describing, from their standpoints, how they experienced dancing.

Throughout Theatres of the Body, each main chapter covers roughly a decade of Philadelphia’s dance history, as linked to a selected discursive element. The book explores connections between dance and visual art in 1820s Philadelphia in chapter 2, dance and political themes (the 1830s) in chapter 3, chapter 4 draws on literary connections in the 1840s, and the scientific drive of the 1850s shapes chapter 5. Each of these themes, and others—religion, reform, music, immigration, education, and more—weave through each chapter, but the stated discursive focus remains the highlight of each dance decade, each chapter. Page 99 alerts readers to the interconnections of dance with significant cultural drives (in this case literature, publication, narrative) and, with the chapter’s opening line about George G. Foster’s newspaper serial “Philadelphia in Slices,” it also points to the “different classes, races, employments, and tastes” among “those who danced or watched dancing” in theatrical and social settings.

Philadelphia’s complexity, generating and exemplifying the turbulent unfolding of the young United States, brought its people’s embodiment of humanity, of change, of personal and group narratives, of individual and aspirational expression to a pitch of excitement and meaning in the antebellum period. Questions of equality, rights, and human status urgently motivated action, including the dancing seen on streets, social-dance floors, and stages of the “mythic” city of Philadelphia, where the founding documents of the new nation were forged. A crucible of national formation, the City of Brotherly Love was also a hotbed of dance training, performance, and commentary as the nation moved toward the cataclysm of Civil War. What role did bodies play here? Digging into the dancing of that age helps us grapple with the weight and ramifications of that question.

Learn more about Theatres of the Body at the Temple University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Hanna E. Morris's "Apocalyptic Authoritarianism"

Hanna E. Morris is an Assistant Professor at the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto and co-chair of the Critical Studies of Climate Media, Discourse, and Power Working Group a part of Brown University's Climate Social Science Network. Her research concentrates on the climate-media-democracy nexus and explores critical questions of power and meaning-making around climate change. She co-edited the book entitled Climate Change and Journalism: Negotiating Rifts of Time (2021) and has published numerous papers in peer-reviewed journals including Environmental Communication, Journal of Language and Politics, Journal of Environmental Media, Media Theory, and Politique Américaine.

Morris applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power, with the following results:

Page 99 of my book has the re-printed image of the cover of The New York Times Magazine’s August 5, 2018, special climate change issue. The cover story was written by the journalist Nathaniel Rich. And as I write in my book: “The cover’s headline is written in small white text atop a black background, almost like the prophetic text of a Magic 8-Ball appearing in the void, and ominously declares: ‘Thirty years ago, we could have saved the planet.’”

In addition to The New York Times Magazine cover image, my following words appear along with the magazine cover:

The prophecy of a planet in peril that scientists like James Hansen warned about, according to Rich, went unheeded due to the careless “masses” duped and manipulated by fossil fuel executives, lobbyists, and the Republican politicians who benefited financially from Big Oil. The out-group is the Republican Party and Big Oil, but Rich elevates the prophet—climate scientists like James Hansen—without much interest in anyone else. Climate activists, environmental justice campaigns, and the many people who have been organizing in response to climate change for decades are sidestepped and even blamed as part of “the masses” who did not follow Hansen’s call soon enough.

Readers opening to page 99 of my book would get a good idea of the whole work. It firstly gives a glimpse of the book’s critical analysis of U.S. news media (both images and text). It secondly highlights how news stories and visuals on climate change repeatedly center and celebrate “visionary sage figures” while denigrating climate activists and especially young, progressive, women of color who are a part of the climate justice movement. At its core, "apocalyptic authoritarianism" entails the construction of a “right” and “wrong” way of knowing and responding to climate change that fearmongers about an all-encompassing, apocalyptic collapse if historically privileged figures (i.e. visionary sages) are not heeded and followed. In turn, exclusionary modes of governance are legitimized as necessary while more robustly democratic alternatives are delegitimized as destabilizing and dangerous. Traditional centers of power are elevated as gods capable of “saving” the nation and planet while historically marginalized groups are demeaned as "militant Others" who are threatening this Earth-saving work. It is here where my book shows how the authority of historically privileged figures is normalized and bolstered by the U.S. press as opposed to investigated and questioned. Ultimately, my book shows how some of the most prominent news publications of record in the U.S. are fanning the flame of apocalyptic authoritarianism instead of reckoning with the roots and ramifications of both climate change and the reactionary politics of today.

Visit Hanna E. Morris's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Carruthers's "Explaining our Actions"

Peter Carruthers is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland. His publications include Human and Animal Minds (2019) and Human Motives: Hedonism, Altruism, and the Science of Affect (2024).

Carruthers applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Explaining our Actions: A Critique of Common-Sense Theorizing, and shared the following:

While I hope that page 99 of my book might provide some indication of the book’s quality, it will give very little idea what it is about. For while the book as a whole catalogs how a great deal of our common-sense psychology and the philosophical theorizing that relies on it is mistaken, page 99 is part of a discussion of one of the things that common-sense gets right. This is that there is a separate category of intentions and goals that are quite distinct from our desires, on the one hand, and our beliefs, on the other. Some philosophers, in contrast, have claimed that intentions just are a certain kind of desire, whereas others have claim that they are really a special sort of belief. In the latter case the claim is that both beliefs and intentions are really commitments to the truth of a proposition, where the distinctive thing about an intention is just that it is a commitment to make a proposition true rather than to it already being true. The text of page 99 is part of a longer discussion showing that these claims are meritless.

Philosophers have mostly addressed questions about the nature of the human mind by relying on some combination of common-sense beliefs, introspection, linguistic analysis, and intuitions generated from imaginary examples. The upshot is what I call the “standard model” of the mind (also known as belief-desire psychology), together with a number of less-standard variants. (The latter include the ideas that intentions can be reduced to desires or to beliefs, mentioned above; that knowledge is a basic kind of mental state, not a special sort of belief; and that there is a distinctive category of graded-strength beliefs, called “credences.”) I show that the standard model is excessively narrow in its scope, since it focuses entirely on so-called “intentional actions.” (These are actions that are selected and caused by our beliefs and desires.) Vast swathes of habitual, speeded, and skilled actions are unjustifiably neglected. Moreover, the standard philosophical account of belief elides together different kinds of mental state as if they were the same, while also including kinds that are actually a kind of intention. And the most popular philosophical account of desire gets the relationship between pleasure and desire completely back-to-front. Pleasures are not experiences we desire to have or to continue. Rather, desires are states that embed anticipatory pleasure in their contents. The overall methodological moral of the book is that standard philosophical techniques are completely bankrupt. To understand the mind we need to engage with the science. Readers of the book should end up with a good idea of the varieties of human action and their true explanations, as well as the real nature of the main categories of mental state that the mind contains.

Learn more about Explaining our Actions at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Human Motives.

--Marshal Zeringue

Susan Hylen's "Gender Mobility"

Susan Hylen is Almar H. Shatford Professor of New Testament at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. She is the author of three other books on gender: Finding Phoebe: What New Testament Women Were Really Like (2023), Women in the New Testament World (2018), and A Modest Apostle: Thecla and the History of Women in the Early Church (2015). She has also written three books on the Gospel of John, including Imperfect Believers: Ambiguous Characters in the Gospel of John (2009). Hylen serves as general editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Gender Mobility: 7 Ideas about Gender in the New Testament Period, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Gender Mobility provides a good snapshot of qualities that pervade this book. The book is a historical exploration of gender as it was constructed in the early Roman period (first and second centuries CE). Page 99 is the beginning of a section on eunuchs as a gender in the Roman world. Part of the appeal of exploring gender in another place and time is that it’s often different from our own culture’s assumptions, which can feel like they are the only possible options. We don’t have eunuchs as a gender today (at least not in the US), but Mediterranean cultures did. This chapter asks what it meant, from their viewpoint, to be a eunuch.

Also on page 99 is the beginning of a section entitled “Freeborn eunuchs.” Ancient societies were very hierarchical, and part of the argument of the book is that social status was incorporated into the construction of gender. So there wasn’t just a single gender, eunuchs, but multiple genders inflected by social status. Freeborn eunuchs had different rights and roles in society than enslaved or freed eunuchs.

In describing freeborn eunuchs, the portion on page 99 engages with the description of freeborn eunuchs in a number of ancient texts. One of the main tasks of the book is presenting and interpreting the evidence available on the subject under discussion. I hope to give readers a clear description of evidence so they can experience it and begin to form their own opinions.

In the case of freeborn eunuchs, there isn’t much evidence available, but what still exists is interesting! For example, on page 99 I explain that the freeborn eunuch, Favorinus, was not castrated, as enslaved eunuchs were, but was born intersex. The fact that he wasn’t castrated fits with the Roman understanding of freeborn status, because in their minds, freeborn men should not be castrated—this was not fitting to their social position. But there were still freeborn men who resembled eunuchs physically, and so the description of Favorinus reflects what it meant at the time to be a freeborn eunuch.

Learn more about Gender Mobility at the Oxford University Press.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kenneth L. Feder's "Native America"

Kenneth L. Feder is professor emeritus of anthropology at Central Connecticut State University. His books include Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, The Past in Perspective: An Introduction to Human Prehistory, and Native American Archaeology in the Parks: A Guide to Native Heritage Sites in Our National Parks and Monuments.

Feder applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Native America: The Story of the First Peoples, with the following results:

The story told in a book that explores the deep history of an entire continent can be likened to the story conveyed by an archaeological site. The individual pages of the book are the equivalent of the multiple layers encountered as archaeologists navigate through time. Page 99 of Native America: The Story of the First Peoples represents one of the layers the reader digs through during their journey.

Specifically, page 99 presents a map depicting the locations of many of the most important sites where archaeologists have intersected with the trail of Native People for the period between more than 20,000 to about 10,000 years ago. This is a time when these First Peoples were adapting to an America much different from our own. That America had vast glaciers covering much of the north and was inhabited by giant beasts like mammoths, mastodons, and varieties of bison that dwarf even their enormous modern cousins. Native people successfully hunted these animals with little more than stone tipped spears, guile, and the force of their will. Had I lived then, I would have strongly considered vegetarianism!

Page 99 represents a moment in a much larger history presented in the book, one told not in cuneiform, hieroglyphs, ink on vellum, or on pages produced with a printing press. Instead, the history conveyed in Native America is written in exquisite and deadly spear points found at the sites located on page 99’s map; in miraculously preserved human footprints located in the crystalline white sands of a New Mexico desert and dating to more than 20,000 years ago; in achingly beautiful and architecturally sophisticated cliff dwellings; in giant sculptures of earth in the form of bears, birds, and an enormous snake; in intriguing paintings and etchings on the walls of soaring cliffs; and in the forensic evidence of tragic battles fought and battles lost when two cultures, one native, one newly arrived, clashed in an existential conflict.

Page 99 may present a mere moment in that deep history, but it reflects quite well the overarching message of Native America: The Story of the First Peoples presenting a part of the ongoing story I tell of the creativity, sophistication, ingenuity, and resilience of the First Peoples of America.

Learn more about Native America at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Erin Michaels's "Test, Measure, Punish"

Erin Michaels is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Test, Measure, Punish: How the Threat of Closure Harms Students, Destroys Teachers, and Fails Schools, and shared the following:

Page 99 is the last page of a chapter, fusing some of the book’s main themes about how neoliberal accountability policies shape the educational experiences of marginalized youth. Specifically, this chapter explains why state accountability pressures drove the school’s already harsh disciplinary regime to get worse. The first part of page 99 reviews how this traditional public school (my case study of Sandview High) operated like the rather notorious “No Excuses Charter School” (NECS). However, I argue that the school’s obsession with social control was not just aimed at improving academic performance. Instead, there was also another state accountability pressure at play: improving students’ suspension and attendance rates, and this actually heightened the punitive setting. The second part of page 99 reviews some of the most painful costs of this regime for students.

Sandview High seemed to be taking the lead from NECS to figure out how to make students perform well. Yet, the focus in NECS has largely been on test scores as the key motivating factor for harsh “no excuses” disciplinary practices for the “normalization of unethical practices.” In contrast, as this case study, and the supplementary data on the ESSA presented early in this chapter reveal, adding non-test student behavior data to the ongoing neoliberal accountability focus of “measuring and punishing” schools worsens punitive schooling, just as a focus on test scores degrades academic lessons.

The pervasive social control at Sandview High, or what I call the school security regime, shaped students in ways that undermined their socialization for citizenship. Students felt mistreated, under surveillance, and contained, and often created narratives that normalized this treatment; all of which taught them that they were “custodial citizens.” That is, they were learning to tolerate an adulthood where they could expect the state to surveil them widely, even when such surveillance did not result in a formal arrest. This models the “custodial class” that Lerman and Weaver emphasize is created in the midst of wide-ranging neighborhood police patrol practices that include routine stop-and-frisks. As they note, if state surveillance is one’s only exposure to the state, there is little room to see the state as something you can make demands on as a democratic citizen entitled to make claims on their government. The intersectional analysis in this chapter also underscores the extra layers of vulnerability in students’ experiences with off-the-record punishment shaped by gender, race, and immigration. Their experiences reflect further social consequences of highly securitized schools, which create additional harms. I expand on these social consequences in the next and final chapter.

The Page 99 Test worked better than I predicted. The book’s main argument is that neoliberal accountability policies threatening schools with closure for low performance is as much about rising state carcerality (punishment and surveillance) as it is about the “business approach” traditionally associated with neoliberal education reform. Page 99 showcases the argument that state pressure on schools to improve their suspension and attendance rates is an overlooked part of how neoliberal accountability has, and continues to, include non-test metrics (like suspension and attendance rates) that also worsen education for marginalized youth, here exacerbating surveillance. I stress how this illustrates one of the ways in which neoliberal accountability ushers in more state carcerality. I also value that page 99 discusses the key consequences of this carcerality that I reveal across the book: how policing youth in school undermines their social development in terms of what they think they deserve, have to put up with, and how this is related to broader lessons for marginalized youth about what the state is and its agents. Throughout the book, I argue that neoliberal accountability policies provoked twin punitive regimes: testing and security, which had vast consequences on students beyond degenerating their academic education: it eroded their sense of political agency.

Learn more about Test, Measure, Punish at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Alan Kramer's "Concentration Camps"

Alan Kramer is a Senior Professor in the Department of History at the University of Hamburg and Professor Emeritus of European History, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Concentration Camps: A Global History, and reported the following:

From page 99:

That decision may have been prompted by the military, which feared that epidemics might spread to the army, and threaten supply routes to the front. They therefore closed the camps at Katma and Azaz, sending the survivors to camps at Akhterim and Bab, closer to Aleppo. The new arrivals were described as ‘thousands of widows, without a single adult male . . . in an appalling state, half naked . . . including hapless children in an indescribably miserable state who resembled human monsters’. Typhus broke out, and at least 50,000 deportees died at Bab by February 1916. Three further camps near Aleppo—Lale, Tefrice, and Munbuc—appear to have served as pure death camps.

The camps in northern Syria in or near Aleppo were shut down one after the other in early 1916, with any survivors being sent down the Euphrates or the line of the Baghdad railway towards Ras ul-Ain. The concentration camp at Ras ul-Ain allowed the majority to survive for a few months until March 1916, when under the orders of the sub-directorate of deportees hundreds were taken out of the camp every day and liquidated. The vast majority were killed by the end of April.

The last phase in this intended destruction of the Armenians began with the arrival of tens of thousands in Deir ez-Zor in the Syrian desert in autumn 1915. Some 150 to 200 died every day. Whenever new arrivals boosted the population, the authorities sent convoys to Mosul. But those who were able to remain managed to build flourishing businesses and craft shops. As the camps around Aleppo were liquidated in spring 1916, the population of Armenians in Deir ez-Zor rose to 200,000. Soon they were marched in groups into the desert and almost all were slaughtered or left to die of thirst and starvation.

Few details of this mass extermination are known, and we know little of the perpetrators and decision-makers, but there is little doubt that Deir ez-Zor was a real death factory where 195,000 were liquidated: a historic crime to be placed next to Treblinka and Auschwitz. By late 1916, altogether probably 600,000 Armenians had been liquidated in the camps or on route. At least one million perished in total (see Map 2.1).

As it happens, this extract gives the reader an excellent indication of the book. The role of concentration camps in the destruction of the Armenians of Ottoman Turkey, 1915-16, described here, is barely known outside a small circle of specialists. The scale of mass murder invites comparison with Nazi genocide. While everyone knows about Nazi concentration camps, this book reveals the global history of the phenomenon. However, the book does not “relativize” Nazi criminality. To compare does not mean to equate, still less to exculpate. The aim is to explain the origins and shifting functions of concentration camps across time, beginning at the turn of the 20th century, with the Spanish policy of “reconcentración” in Cuba. The British “concentration camps” in South Africa, 1900 to 1902, in which thousands of white Boer civilians were interned, became a byword for misery and mass death. Yet the equally tragic fate of thousands of black Africans in the British camps was conveniently ignored in subsequent South African history.

Page 99 gives a correct impression of my argument that one cannot reserve the term “concentration camp” exclusively for the Nazi camps. It gives the false impression that concentration camps were invariably death camps: the great majority were not, as the book explains.

This is a transnational history that enquires after learning processes between regimes and states, including even liberal democracies. How did the memory of colonial concentration camps predetermine the Nazi decision to establish brutal concentration camps in 1933, and later to embark on policies of genocide? The colonial theme is significant in another regard: I argue that high modern empire-building is a crucial element in almost all concentration camp systems. There is moreover an intimate connection between war, or warlike mobilization, and camps.

Concentration camps, alas, have not only a past, but also a present. Conscious of the risk posed by the absence of documents that most states keep secret for three or more decades, I have attempted to take the story into the contemporary world. Even the most secretive states, Communist China and North Korea, have been unable to prevent the leaking of confidential documents which allow an insight into their camp regimes.

Ultimately, authoritarian states created concentration camps because they offer a short-cut to a projected utopia of ‘purity’, dispensing with such inconveniences as human rights, the legal system, and democracy.

Learn more about Concentration Camps at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Julia Brock's "Closed Seasons"

Julia Brock is assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Closed Seasons: The Transformation of Hunting in the Modern South, with the following results:

Page 99 of Closed Seasons: The Transformation of Hunting in the Modern South brings us into Chapter 3, which tells the story of Charlie Young (1883-1970), an African American hunter, dog trainer, and hunting guide who spent most of his life and career in southwest Georgia. The page itself offers analysis on how Young’s position served the priorities and preferences of elite white sportsmen, who used black subordinates as part of their enactment of hunting pageantry. The page also quotes Young, who wrote a short memoir in 1964 reminiscing on his time as a hunter and hunting guide, reflecting on historical change in his corner of the U.S. South. His voice reveals the deep joy he took in hunting and dog training, and acts as a counterpoint to the meaning of the hunt imposed by wealthy sportsmen.

Page 99 then, highlights a central tension in Closed Seasons: the attempts by sportsmen in the early twentieth century to make the natural world fit their priorities–one open to hunting for sport yet often closed to those who hunted purely for subsistence or the market. These elite hunters, who sincerely argued on behalf of imperiled species, made bogeymen of “pothunters,” market hunters, and black men, and campaigned successfully for laws that reinforced their exclusive access to field and prey. Yet rural, non-elite southern hunters, black and white, cherished their own meaning of the hunt and struggled to assert their right to keep hunting traditions intact, often by refusing to follow new, Progressive-era laws. The book follows the evolution of game and fish laws with a close eye on the social imagination of conservation advocates, the response by everyday southerners, the changing field of wildlife science, and the increasing role of the federal government in wildlife protection.

Learn more about Closed Seasons at the University of North Carolina Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Chris Sweeney's "The Feather Detective"

Chris Sweeney is a nonfiction writer who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. His first book, The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne, was named one of the best/don’t-miss books of summer 2025 by numerous outlets, including NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Elle, The Millions, and the New York Post, and it received rave reviews elsewhere. The book tells the incredible true story of Roxie Laybourne, a scientist stationed within the Smithsonian who pioneered the field of forensic ornithology and studied feathers recovered from airplane crashes, murder scenes, poaching cases, and other calamities.

Sweeney applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Feather Detective and shared the following:

Page 99 focuses mostly on an amusing exchange that occurred in 1963 between the Smithsonian Institution's Roxie Laybourne, the subject of the biography and the pioneer of forensic ornithology, and a chicken farmer in Newton, Iowa, who claimed to have created a special instrument for quickly determining the sex of just-hatched birds that he named the “Chixexer.” At the time, Roxie was trying to develop methods for determining the sex of Whooping Cranes, which were teetering toward extinction; knowing which cranes were males and which were females was critical to improving breeding efforts. Roxie, who was a leading ornithological expert, reached out to the farmer explaining the circumstances, and received a patronizing response in which the farmer suggested she pay $300 to train under him for a few days, claiming it would save her much time and disappointment. As the page notes, Roxie did not take him up on the offer.

I am surprised to say that page 99 encapsulates some of the bigger themes in The Feather Detective and would signal to a single-page reader that this is a book about a woman scientist who is engaged in some unusual bird research and constantly running into social and scientific obstacles. The page makes reference to Roxie’s tireless work ethic and varied caseload: “When Roxie wasn’t practicing her technique at zoos or catching up on feather identifications, she was chasing down leads on bird-sexing techniques like a gumshoe reporter.” And page 99 allows readers to hear a little bit of Roxie’s voice as it directly quotes her letter to the farmer.

Interestingly, Roxie’s foray into Whooping Crane research was an aberration. Ninety-nine percent of Roxie’s cases focused on identifying tiny fragments of feathers from airplane strikes, crime scenes, and other calamities, and that is the main focus of the book. It’s called The Feather Detective, after all, not The Whooping Crane Sexxer. And yet, stripped of context, page 99 stands on its own as a telling snapshot of Roxie while giving readers a sense of the book’s narrative style. The quality of the whole, I think, is revealed in this one page.

Visit Chris Sweeney's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Richard J. Sexton's "Food Fight"

Richard J. Sexton is Distinguished Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at University of California, Davis. He is founder and coeditor of Agricultural and Resource Economics Update, a University of California magazine devoted to contemporary food and environmental issues. He has published extensively in leading economics and agricultural journals.

Sexton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Food Fight: Misguided Policies, Supply Challenges, and the Impending Struggle to Feed a Hungry World, and reported the following:

Food Fight is about the challenges we will face in the 21st Century to adequately feed the world and avoid rising food prices and increasing hunger and malnutrition. Food Fight documents the increase in food demand that is certain to occur in the century and the challenges to expanding supplies sufficiently to meet demand growth due to declining agricultural productivity, climate change, pest resistance and more. It is also about destructive public policies enacted by governments around the world that are guaranteed to produce less, not more, food.

Amidst this big picture, page 99 in Food Fight does a good job of illustrating one of the key policy issues. It is part of the chapter on organic foods. People, mainly wealthier ones, like to consume organic foods because they think they are healthier than the conventional alternative, although no evidence supports such claims, and they think organic is better for the environment. However, converting land to organic production reduces the yield of that land by 30 – 45%, depending on crop and production location. This results in less food production on a given land base, raises food prices, and causes expansion of the land base in agriculture, known as extensification. Conversion of forested lands for agriculture is harmful to the environment in many dimensions, among them greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. Yet governments around the world support the expansion of organic agriculture.

Page 99 discusses whether the organic yield decrement will increase or decrease in response to policy-driven expansion of organic acreage. It also addresses the adverse environmental implications due to expanded organic production and the concomitant expansion of the agricultural land base that ensues.

Commentators through recent centuries, with Thomas Malthus most prominent among them, have forecasted that the world would not be able to expand food production sufficiently to feed a growing population. They painted a bleak picture of hunger and starvation that has proven, for the most part, to be dramatically wrong. Food Fight’s message is different. Despite likely dramatic growth in food demand in this Century, and strong headwinds to expanding supplies as we’ve done in the past, we can still succeed as a global society in meeting the challenge if we stop enacting policies guaranteed to reduce food supplies and instead remove the shackles we’ve placed upon the agricultural industry and support policies to expand food supplies.

Learn more about Food Fight at the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue