Tech to Table: 25 Innovators Reimagining Food

Product Description
Imagine eating a burger grown in a laboratory, a strawberry picked by a robot, or a pastry created with a 3-D printer. You would never taste the difference, but these technologies might just save your health and the planet’s. Today, landmark advances in computing, engineering, and medicine are driving solutions to the biggest problems created by industrialized food.
Tech to Table introduces readers to twenty-five of the most creative entrepreneurs advancing these solutions. They come from various places and professions, identities and backgrounds. But they share an outsider’s perspective and an idealistic, sometimes aggressive, ambition to rethink the food system.
Reinvention is desperately needed. Under Big Ag, pollution, climate change, animal cruelty, hunger, and obesity have festered, and despite decades of effort, organic farming accounts for less than one percent of US croplands. Entrepreneurs represent a new path, one where disruptive technology helps people and the environment. These innovations include supplements to lower the methane in cattle belches, drones that monitor irrigation levels in crops, urban warehouses that grow produce year-round, and more.
The pace and breadth of change is astonishing, as investors pump billions of dollars into ag-innovation. Startups are attracting capital and building markets, with the potential to upend conventional agribusiness’s stranglehold on the food system. Not every invention will prosper long-term, but each marks a fundamental change in our approach to feeding a growing population—sustainably.
A revolution in how we grow and eat food is brewing. Munson’s deftly crafted profiles offer a fascinating preview of the coming future of food.
Review
"This is a book we've been waiting for, documenting the entrepreneurial creativity now sweeping through our food and farming space. In neat and efficient packages, Munson gives us technically precise descriptions of two-dozen recent innovations, along with vivid cameos of the respective innovators, helping readers catch up instantly with all that's new.
Tech to Table will be an inspiration for values-driven readers who want to dream, think, and act big."
-- Robert Paarlberg, author of Resetting the Table: Straight Talk About the Food We Grow and Eat
"Tech to Table is a skillful first-hand account which addresses both the challenges facing food and agriculture, as well as the tech-driven transformation that is shaping its renaissance. For readers seeking a conversational and sometimes provocative look at food system innovators, this is a well-curated collection of entrepreneurial insights and experiences."
-- Seana Day, Partner, Better Food Ventures & Culterra Capital
"Food production is at the heart of humanity's environmental problems and our environmental solutions. Richard Munson skillfully tells the tale of those food sustainability heroes deploying 21st century technology to ensure our continued survival. Their stories in this book give me hope!"
-- Paul Shapiro, author of Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World
Review
"Food production is at the heart of humanity's environmental problems and our environmental solutions. Richard Munson skillfully tells the tale of those food sustainability heroes deploying 21st century technology to ensure our continued survival. Their stories in this book give me hope!"
-- Paul Shapiro, author of Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World
About the Author
Richard Munson is the author of several books, including
Tesla: Inventor of the Modern. He also has written a biography of Jacques Cousteau, a history of electricity, and a behind-the-scenes look at how congressional appropriators spend taxpayer money. Now based in Chicago, Munson has worked on environmental and clean-energy issues at non-profits, within universi