Fresco has published an extensive collection of articles in both scientific journals and the popular media. She writes a fortnightly column for the newspaper NRC Handelsblad and is regularly asked to participate in national and international radio and television programmes.
She has published twelve non-scientific books in Dutch, including three novels.
In October 2012 she published the book Hamburgers in Paradise. Food in times of Scarcity and Abundance. The book is published in English by Princeton University Press and in French at Julliard Laffont. In 2014 she published Kruisbestuiving (‘Cross Pollination’) about art, science and life. In 2015 a new edition of De tuin van de sultan van Rome (‘The garden of the Sultan of Rome’) was published.
She is also a member of PEN, the international association of writers which fights for freedom of expression and works on behalf of writers who are oppressed for their views. She is a member of the Vereniging van Letterkundigen (Dutch Writers Guild). Fresco is also an enthusiastic supporter of the arts.
In 2013 she worked on a six-part documentary, Fresco’s Paradijs (Fresco’s Paradise), for the Dutch broadcasting station Omroep Human. This documentary was broadcast on the Dutch television station Nederland 2 on a weekly basis starting 13 October 2013.
Louise O. Fresco published over 160 scientific publications and policy papers as well as eight non-scientific books in Dutch. She has published widely outside her scientific field as a columnist, a literary critic, and as a writer of novels and essays (in Dutch) and is an acclaimed public speaker. In 2008 she resumed writing a bi-weekly newspaper column on international affairs in the NRC.
Her novels De Kosmopolieten (The Cosmopolitans), published in 2002 and De tuin van de sultan van Rome (The Garden of the Sultan of Rome) published in 2005 were extremely well received by the press. De Utopisten ( The Utopians) published in 2008, is a stunning portrait of a generation that has been given power and influence, in a country in search of new pathways. The Utopians was short listed for a major literary prize (Libris) in 2008.
Her book Hamburgers in het paradijs. Voedsel in tijden van schaarste en overvloed was published in October 2012. The English translation, titled “Hamburgers in Paradise. The stories behind the food we eat”, is published by Princeton University Press in 2015. It reflects three decades of travels throughout the world in search of how food is produced, how it is consumed and how we can use the lessons of the past to design food systems of the future. This book is more than an extended version of her collection of essays published in 2006, entitled Nieuwe Spijswetten (New Food Laws).
Two other collections of essays of Louise O. Fresco, published in Dutch are De ondraaglijke lichtheid van de vleermuis(1997) and Schaduwdenkers & Lichtzoekers (1999)
In 2006 she delivered the so-called Duisenberg Lecture during a lunch event at the Annual Meeting of the IMF, resulting in a widely noted publication: Biomass, Food or Fuel, is there a dilemma?
During her years in the Netherlands she became involved in journalism and literature through her work as a literary critic for various papers and her columns on science for one of the leading newspapers, leading to a life long commitment to science journalism as well as literature and poetry.