A recently published book demolishes the often-heard claim that the food and agriculture system is "broken" and needs to be scrapped. On the contrary, we can't live without an industrial food system, the book maintains. Growing food at scale is necessary; small, local and low-tech farms can produce food for elitists, but they can't feed society.

To food critic Michael Pollan's adage that we shouldn't eat anything our great-grandmothers wouldn't have recognized as food, the book replies: "Thanks, in part, to poor food, your great-grandmother's society was chronically unhealthy." And backs the reply with evidence.

The book is pro-GMO and questions whether processing or even ultra-processing food is necessarily bad. As for fast food, the book's opening pages are a paean to the waffles at Waffle House, described in loving detail as made possible by the industrial-food system.

In addition, the book seems to have a clear-eyed view of farming: "Farmers are businesspeople, and they use the tools they have to produce what they are incentivized to produce."

Does this sound like a book technology-using commercial farmers will like? Well, while the book defends the system, it thinks it can be improved -- and some of the improvements it recommends would drastically change the lives of many commercial farmers.

You can feel the book's competing tugs in its title: "Feed the People: Why Industrial Food Is Good and How to Make It Even Better." The authors, Jan Dutkiewicz and Gabriel N. Rosenberg, are academics and their politics are progressive. Dutkiewicz is a vegan.

Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg argue for what they call "democratic hedonism" -- pleasure in food for everyone, not just the elite. There's no pleasure in food if you can't afford it, and many of the book's chapters argue for more generous food stamp benefits and school lunches; for higher minimum wages for food-system workers, who they say are among society's most food insecure; and for enabling those workers to bargain collectively with their employers.

Among the food pleasures they defend are the guilty kind, though they say these should be indulged in only occasionally. At one point they proclaim, "Sorry, but Doritos are delicious."

One pleasure they think should fall into the guilty category is meat.

The book recites the well-known arguments for vegetarianism and veganism: producing meat is an inefficient way of generating the world's calories, cruel to animals and a disaster for the environment.

Visiting Iowa, they call it a state where the incentives have led farmers into "growing crops mostly not eaten by humans, supporting an inhumane factory-farming industry, and despoiling the state's soil and water."

They're also anti-ethanol.

Dutkiewicz and Rosenberg don't argue for banning anything, including meat; they favor changing the incentives for producing and consuming it. They don't go into detail, but they seem to favor taxing meat and regulating farm practices.

For example, at one point they allude to the possibility of "implementing penalties for glyphosate runoff under the Clean Water Act and scrapping requirements for ethanol in fuel."

Whether you agree with any or all of this -- and most farmers won't -- it's worth thinking through its real-world implications.

Were farmers to grow much less corn and soybeans and much more fruits and vegetables, as the authors hope, would the farmers and the businesses that cater to them survive? Is there enough consumer demand for fruits and vegetables to support this conversion?

The authors have given that a bit of thought: "If we want American farmers to sell more fresh fruits and vegetables to Americans, more Americans will need to buy more American-grown fruit and veggies," they write.

"That might involve tools like incentivizing healthy food purchases in schools or through programs like SNAP. It could mean extending programs like crop insurance and other subsidies beyond corn, soy, and wheat. It might help to introduce value-added taxes that would make fresh produce less expensive relative to processed foods. But ultimately it means creating demand that farmers can supply at a profit."

That's a glib answer to a serious question. Yes, if demand could be created for more fruits and vegetables -- a considerable if -- new infrastructure to supply farmers with inputs and distribute their products would eventually be developed. It would, though, be a wrenching conversion. There would be many casualties, both farms and agribusinesses.

The authors are right in maintaining that scrapping the food system and starting over is economically and politically impossible. They believe their solutions have the benefit of being politically possible.

Possible, maybe, but improbable. Rightly or wrongly, there are a lot of farmers and agribusiness people with a lot invested in an agriculture system built around meat. They won't give it up easily and they're not without political power.

All that said, this is an informative, thought-provoking and readable book. It's worth your time regardless of where you stand on the issues discussed.

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanize@gmail.com

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