The Last Supper (Sam Kass)

Stopping–or slowing–the climate crisis is not going to be easy, but it is possible. President Obama’s Senior Advisor on food and nutrition breaks down how the key to fixing the climate crisis is going to be found in how we are fed...and the answer is far beyond simply shopping at the farmer’s market. But the good news is: We know how to get there.

As a chef in high-end restaurants, and later, in the home of then-Senator Barack and Michelle Obama, Sam Kass read a lot about how eating organic and buying local was the key to remaking a food system otherwise built on climate-change-causing fossil fuels.

But when he served the Obamas as a Senior Advisor in the White House, he realized something: While it’s easy to identify the problems in our spoiled food system, fixing it is not as simple as getting your eggs from the farmers’ market. It’s going to take supporting promising new technologies, compelling businesses to sell us what we need, and changing policy and our culture. It won’t be easy, and frankly, time is not on our side. But the good news is, The Last Supper lays out the way to save our food, planet, and our way of life.

In The Last Supper, Kass shares everything he’s learned, from successes (and educational failures) in the White House and working with big business big and small to improve our food system, to exciting, possibly world-changing technologies that are here today, waiting to be unleashed at scale. He lays out an accessible plan to save our food, the environment, and in turn, ourselves, based on four pillars of change: 

• Culture: Shifting the way we prioritize and think about food, person to person, neighbor to neighbor 
• Policy and legislation: The vital role of policy and how change can actually be made on a governmental level  
• Business: How to change the (big) businesses that provide the vast majority of food we eat  
• Technology: There are no silver bullets, but incredible leaps in tech are here today that can produce food far more efficiently, turn markets into a force for good, and even turn back the clock on carbon emissions