The End of Food
The End of Food Paul Roberts, best-selling author of The End of Oil, turns his attention to the modern food economy and finds that the system entrusted to meet our most basic needs is failing dramatically.
In this carefully researched, vividly recounted narrative, Roberts lays out the stark economic realities beneath modern food and shows how our system for making, marketing, and moving what we eat is growing less and less compatible with the billions of consumers that system was built to serve.
At the heart of The End of Food is a grim paradox: the rise of large-scale, hyper-efficient industrialized food production, though it generates more food more cheaply than at any time in history, has reached a point of dangerously diminishing returns. Our high-volume factory systems are creating new risks for food-borne illness from E. coli to avian flu. Our high-yield crops and livestock generate grain, vegetables and meat of declining nutritional quality. Overproduction is so routine that nearly one billion people are now overweight or obese worldwide and yet those extra calories are still so unevenly distributed that the same number of people one billion, roughly one in every seven of us can’t get enough to eat. In some of the hardest-hit regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, the lack of a single nutrient vitamin A has left more than 5 million children permanently blind.
Meanwhile, the shift to heavily mechanized, chemically intensive farming has so compromised the soils, water systems, and other natural infrastructure upon which all food production depends that it’s unclear how long such output can be maintained. And just as we’ve begun to understand the limits of our industrialized superabundance, the burgeoning economies of Asia, where newly wealthy consumers are rapidly adopting Western-style, meat-heavy diets, are putting new demands on global food supplies.
Comprehensive and global, with lucid writing, dramatic detail and fresh insights, The End of Food offers readers new, accessible way to understand the vulnerable miracle of the modern food economy. Roberts presents clear, stark visions of the future and helps us prepare to make the decisions — personal and global — we must make to survive the demise of food production as we know it.
Paul Roberts is the author of The End of Oil, which was a 2005 New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award Finalist. He has written about the resource economics and politics for numerous publications, including The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone, and lectures frequently on business and environmental issues.
Customer Review: food problems
I have been concerned with our food supply. I found this book an excellent source of information. Here is a short summary of what I got from reading it:
Our concentration on money as the only really important thing in our lives had led us to ignore all the other problems facing us.
To a greater and greater extent, our food comes from large, monoculture farms using heavy applications of synthetic fertilizer. This results in deterioration of the topsoil, which leads to decreasing crops and eventually changes arable land to a desert. This style of farming is heavily dependent on oil, and we face an imminent oil shortage.
In addition, the world is also facing a serious water shortage; and farmers are reluctant to save water when it will either cost money or reduce the crop.
If food were distributed equitably, there is enough in the world to feed the present population. But, with the population explosion and the decreasing food supply this situation will not last unless something drastic is done.
As a result of our focus on money, there is widespread corruption in our government, which is not willing to do anything about the problem that will hurt the big corporations, the source of big money. And in general, those corporations like things the way they are.
Paul Roberts lists a number of disasters that would precipitate the situation. The question is, which will come first.
This book is not for those who believe “everything is for the best in this best of possible worlds”.
But for the rest of us, it is an excellent account of our food problems and what causes them.
Customer Review: More alarmism
Paul Roberts’ End of Food is plagued by the same problems found in his previous book, The End of Oil.
Parts of both books are interesting as they shed light on some immediate concerns.
But ultimately both books suffer from his obvious lack of understanding of technological innovation (we have heard ‘the end of food’ in the 60s, 70s and 80s as well) and simple economics.
This book is only for those on the far left who have been convinced we are running out of everything for over 40 years.
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