Andrew Flachs, "Feeding the World as If People Mattered: How Small Farms Produce Value Beyond Yields" (U Arizona Press, 2026)
New Books in EconomicsShow Notes
Backyard gardens flush with cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers where bees buzz and chickens scratch. Beyond, a forest filled with blackberries and jewelweed. Inspired by childhood memories of his grandmother’s overflowing backyard garden, author Andrew Flachs has embarked on a multi-continent, decades-long look at agriculture and its value.
The dominant view of agriculture has focused only on what we produce. It sees value in terms of capital gains or yield efficiency, masking how our global food system produces tremendous amounts of food commodities while failing to feed people, support rural communities, or enhance ecological well-being. Feeding the World as if People Mattered: How Small Farms Produce Value Beyond Yields (University of Arizona Press, 2026) asks us to look more deeply and more humanely at what we perceive to be most valuable in our agricultural systems.
This book draws on fifteen years of anthropological research, taking readers to fields in South India, Eastern Europe, and North America, where people are already feeding the future amid global change. From these fields, Flachs shows us how a radical rethinking of the value of small farms and farmers is already happening. Bringing together conversations in agriculture, economics, anthropology, and the environmental humanities, Flachs deftly shows how small farms reproduce social and ecological relationships that are the only sustainable path forward.
For anyone who is curious about the food on their plate and the people who helped to get it there, Feeding the World as if People Mattered will offer a new way to find value in the food we grow and the people who grow it.
Dr. Andrew Flachs researches food and agriculture systems, exploring genetically modified crops, heirloom seeds, and our own microbiomes. Born and raised in rural Pennsylvania, he graduated from Oberlin College with dual Bachelor of Music and Bachelor of Arts degrees in 2010. He earned his PhD from Washington University in St. Louis in April 2016 and was a 2016-2017 Volkswagen Exchange Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Heidelberg University Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies. He is currently an associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University. His work among farmers in North America, the Balkans, and South India investigates ecological knowledge and technological change in agricultural systems spanning Cleveland urban gardens and Indian GM cotton fields. His research has been supported by public and private institutions including the Department of Education, the National Geographic Society, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the Social Science Research Council, while his writing on agricultural development has been featured in numerous peer-reviewed publications as well as public venues including Sapiens, Salon, and the National Geographic magazine. His work has been recognized by eight international awards, including most recently as a finalist for the Society for Economic Anthropology Kate Browne Creativity in Research Award and the International Convention of Asia Scholars’ Book Prize.
Sandra Elizabeth is a graduate student enrolled at the Department of Sociology in Shiv Nadar University, Delhi- NCR. She looks at rice farmers’ and their way of life in Kuttanad, Kerala—which is dubbed as the state’s rice granary. She can be reached out on X.
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics
More from New Books in Economics
When American churches face financial difficulties, a disproportionately high number of Black churches reorganize under chapter 11 bankruptcy. There are no easy explanations for this distinction: not location, denomination, leadership structure, or the reasons for the loans. In Forgive Us Our Debts: How Black Churches Use Bankruptcy to Survive (U Chicago Press, 2026), legal scholar Pamela Foohey asks why, then, Black churches account for two-thirds of all congregations that file for chapter 11 bankruptcy every year.
Understanding the world of art—particularly antiquities and archaeological artifacts—requires tracing how objects are removed from the ground, displaced by conflict or economic hardship, and ultimately reappear in the international art market. The odyssey of an artifact from its excavation site to an auction house, a private collection, or a museum display case raises a host of pressing concerns about the fragility of cultural heritage but also the global mechanisms that sustain its circulation. In recent years, growing awareness of a possible link between the illegal antiquities trade and terrorist financing has brought new scrutiny to regions marked by war and instability, particularly in the Middle East. In such places, archaeological sites are especially vulnerable to looting and illicit excavation, with the profits from these "blood antiquities" sometimes flowing back to fund further violence.
B. Joseph Pine II is an internationally acclaimed author, speaker, and management advisor to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial startups, and cofounder of Strategic Horizons. Previous books include The Experience Economy, which is credited with introducing the concept of “experience” to the business world, Authenticity, and Mass Customization.
Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work (Princeton UP, 2026) retheorizes capitalism from the perspective of the service economy, challenging conventional assumptions about how work is waged, regulated, managed, and automated Today, 80 percent of U.S. workers do service work, from delivering takeout to mopping floors to teaching. Each time we are handed a bag of groceries or a cup of coffee, call for a cab or have our homework graded, we confront both the enormity and the intimacy of the contemporary service sector. Do these jobs have anything in common? Who is doing this work? And what kind of labor politics does it generate? If service work has often been treated as a footnote to modern capitalism, Beneath the Wage reveals it as crucial to understanding how exploitation functions today. Uncovering a history that runs from eighteenth-century servants to present-day gig workers, Annie McClanahan retheorizes capitalism from the perspective of the service economy, challenging conventional assumptions about how work is waged, regulated, managed, and automated. Assembling a diverse set of sources for understanding and reimagining service work—from reality television and conceptual poetry to novels and workers’ own descriptions of what they do—McClanahan explores three paradigmatic types of contemporary service labor: superexploited tipwork, deskilled clerical microwork, and informalized gigwork. She shows how work done “beneath the wage” depends on racialized and gendered forms of economic domination, is often excluded from labor organizing and regulation, and yet has begun to generate a new politics of social reproduction and solidarity.
Making Sense of China's Economy (Routledge, 2023) untangles China’s complex economic structure, evolving issues and curious contradictions, and explains some key features of this most puzzling of global economic powerhouses. This book reveals how factors such as demographics, the initial stage of development in 1978, the transition away from full state ownership and central planning, the dual urban-rural society, and a decentralised governance structure have combined to shape the economy, its development and its reforms.