Ellen Gustafson’s We the Eaters: If We Change Dinner, We Can Change the World, may have a clumsy title, but the book takes a trenchant and well-researched look at America’s high tech farming and the denatured food it produces. The food activist goes further, by laying out how processors take that food and fill it with sugar, fat, salt, and additives while draining out the nutrition.

And Gustafson goes further still, describing how fast food corporations and junk food convenience stores are muscling out indigenous farming practices and wholesome food not only in our country, but around the world. Developing nations are getting a double whammy, she says, as nutrient-deficient junk food creates growth-stunting hunger in children, and she documents how this results in obesity later in life.

She knows whereof she speaks. Gustafson is the co-founder of Food Tank (a food think tank) and FEED projects. She was previously a spokesperson for the UN World Food Programme and she has seen the dire results of this harmful food system up close in countries like Uganda and Guatemala.

To make her points, Gustafson penetrates deeply into the creation of the typical fast food meal–a sugary soft drink, a hamburger on a white bun, and fried potatoes–and details the disastrous effect it has along the way. She writes: “Almost every step of the industrial meat supply chain degrades someone or something: the cows, the land, the farmers and industry workers, the consumers, and the communities these industries operate in.”

The book reveals how changes in our eating habits over the past 40 years mirror the growth of the fast food industry. For example, from 1970 to 2011, the consumption of fresh-from-the-market potatoes decreased by over a third, while consumption of processed potatoes increased by nearly 30 percent.

“The fast food industry and companies like Heinz basically took the nutritious potato and the nutritious tomato and made them into a fat, salt, and sugar delivery system called French fries with ketchup,” Gustafson writes.

For part of the book, Gustafson critiques the political, economic, and social effects of the industrial food system, much like Marion Nestle’s Food Politics, Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved, and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. But the most interesting parts of the book recount her discoveries in areas of hunger and malnutrition.

In Uganda, for instance, Gustafson visited an area of extreme poverty and malnutrition. She expected to find a lack of food, but instead found stores with plenty of white bread, donuts, pastries, and cookies, lots of Coca-Cola, and candy. “Somehow,” she writes, “Our massive snack and drink companies had figured out how to get their processed corn, soy, wheat, and sugar products to those at the farthest reaches of extreme poverty, even as distribution of good quality, nutritious food remained an insurmountable problem.”