SOLD! Cleaning Our Plates (by Amanda Claire Starbuck)

I’m thrilled to announce the sale of Amanda Claire Starbuck’s Cleaning Our Plates: The Battle to Keep Pollutants Out of Our Food to Kate Marshall at University of California Press!

Clean-eating influencers. MAHA moms. The slow-food movement. Vegans and vegetarians. They all share the same nagging fear: What’s getting into our food, and why can’t we stop it?

An estimated 48 million Americans get sick from foodborne illness each year, according to the CDC. Image: USA TODAY.

For Amanda, Research Director at Food & Water Watch and a mother of two, these questions follow her from the office to the supermarket. Her book opens with a shopping trip familiar to anyone who has navigated a grocery store with young children: pleas for cartoon-branded cereal, applesauce pouches, and SpongeBob string cheese, accompanied by an increasingly exasperated chorus of “Why?” But behind her answers are concerns her children don’t hear—about food recalls, heavy metals, plastic packaging, and the companies paying to place their products at a seven-year-old’s eye level. Why should it fall to parents to figure out which foods are safe for their kids? Isn’t grocery shopping stressful enough?

Cleaning Our Plates argues that Americans have been sold a false promise: that we can shop, cook, and label-read our way out of a contaminated food system. Salad greens tainted by factory farm runoff, baby foods containing heavy metals, and meals contaminated by microplastics are predictable consequences of a system that allows powerful industries to shift the costs of their pollution onto the public.

Amanda takes readers inside the supply chains and lobbying machines of the food, chemical, and fossil fuel industries. She investigates how pathogens travel from livestock operations to produce fields, how pesticide manufacturers work to discredit evidence of harm, and how the fossil fuel industry helped create our dependence on disposable plastic. Throughout, she asks who profits, who pays, and what would have to change to keep these pollutants off our plates.

The book pairs these investigations with practical, affordable ways to reduce everyday exposure, recognizing that most families have neither unlimited grocery budgets nor time to research every ingredient. Drawing on Food & Water Watch’s two decades of advocacy, Amanda also shows how readers can help push for stronger regulation, antitrust enforcement, and corporate accountability.

A North Dakota native and the granddaughter of wheat farmers, Amanda has spent the past decade investigating corporate power in the food system. Her research and commentary have appeared in outlets including The Guardian, PBS NewsHour, BBC World Service, and Food & Wine.

I’m especially pleased to be working again with Kate, a friend with whom I’ve collaborated on several books by Marion Nestle, most recently Sugar Coated. She’s building an exceptional list exploring our food system and its connections to the environment, public health, and social justice. Amanda’s book has found a wonderful home.

Congratulations to Amanda and Kate!