41 pages • 1 hour read
Hope JahrenThe Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 2, Chapters 8-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Food”
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary: “Making Sugar”
In this short chapter, Jahren analyzes sugar. Convenience foods, including packaged goods and easy-to-prepare meals, are usually packed with sugar. Currently, three-fourths of all foods that Americans buy have added sugar to enhance their taste and marketability. Sugar derives from multiple products, including sugar cane or beets. High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is a byproduct of corn and is now an extremely common sweetener in foods. “Today,” Jahren writes, “one out of every three calories from sugar in the American diet is consumed as HFCS” (69). It’s also a product that America exports to other countries. HFCS is not necessarily unhealthier than table sugar, but neither is beneficial.
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “Throwing It All Away”
Jahren opens with the history of sewers in St. Paul, Minnesota, which transport and dispose of the 2 pounds of solid waste and 10 pounds of urine that each individual creates every week. In a city the size of St. Paul, that’s 36 tons of feces and 150,000 gallons of urine every single day. Sewer systems transport the waste to facilities that treat, settle, and filter it before returning it as water to nearby rivers, ponds, or the ocean. Americans depend on this extensive network of waste-related infrastructure, much of which has not been updated in decades. Many sewer systems, bridges, and roads are derelict. As Americans now consume 15% more food on a daily basis than they did in years past, that equates to more waste and more stress on aging sewer systems.
Jahren notes that at least the United States has sewer systems, which is a benefit many populations around the world do not have. “A large fraction of the world,” she notes, “has yet to share in even the most rudimentary benefits conferred during our decades-long global pursuit of more” (76). However, sewage is not the only waste. Food waste is a major problem: OECD countries produce 30% of the globe’s food waste but make up only 15% of the population, meaning richer nations produce far more trash.
Part 2, Chapters 8-9 Analysis
Jahren does not connect Chapter 8’s focus on sugar to Chapter 3, “How We Are,” but the reader would benefit from understanding the close association between sugar consumption and the primary causes of death in OECD countries. In “How We Are,” Jahren writes that in wealthier countries such as the United States, leading causes of death are diseases related to lifestyle, including diabetes, stroke, and heart attack. The fact that the standard American diet includes a significant amount of sugar contributes to these lifestyle-related diseases.
Rather than noting connections like this one explicitly, Jahren relies on largely self-contained chapters. This makes the individual components of her argument punchier and easier to absorb; her use of personal anecdotes serves a similar purpose, humanizing what could be a dry presentation of data into something more relatable. In doing so, Jahren makes some assumptions about the average reader—for instance, that they will understand the American slogans and cultural norms that underpin her personal stories, and that they will connect the dots between the book’s short and discrete chapters with an eye toward Jahren’s broader purpose.
This purpose begins to emerge more clearly in Chapter 9. Jahren has now taken the reader on a journey through the food supply chain, starting from seeds in the ground, through the slaughter of animals, and finally to excrement and food waste. It’s a rhetorically effective narrative, providing the reader with clear examples of growth and glut: more grain, more animals, more fish, more sugar, more trash, and more sewage. “We throw 40 percent of everything we just accomplished into the garbage,” she points out (78). In later chapters, Jahren will demonstrate how this excess negatively affects the environment, including carbon levels in the atmosphere that lead to global warming.
