Something to chew on
THE END OF FOOD
By Paul Roberts
416 pp. Houghton Mifflin $26.00
Reviewed by Rebeca Schiller
With the recent headlines on the food crisis, Malthusians and Chicken Little fans will feel even more vindicated for their “I told you so” after they read Paul Roberts’ important The End of Food, which presents the harsh economic realities of the modern food system. Roberts, author of the bestselling The End of Oil, takes a comprehensive look into the global food economy and the way we produce, market, and consume food today.
Approaching the subject from different angles, Roberts researched and interviewed the numerous links and players in the food chain. He traveled to Europe to study its food systems and discovered how processors struggle to balance older food customs with the need to industrialize for modern consumption demands. In an interview with the president of a meat-packing plant in northwestern France, we learn how far a manufacturer will go to keep his customers happy. Roberts vividly describes the way employees reconstruct a pig’s leg from other pieces of pork to make it look pale pink and homogenous. As the president tells him, “...this is a problem because the muscles in a real pig are sometimes dark, sometimes light and sometimes next to fat, which is not welcomed by the customers. Or retailers. Now we have to make our hams homogenous.”
Roberts visited numerous facilities in the meat, grain and produce industries across the United States and found that the large-scale production capacities have an “OPEC-like influence over world markets.” He then goes on to China, whose increasing population and demand is taking over some of that power—we learn that China is a net exporter of corn and soybeans, a threat to American farmers —and is changing the face of the entire food system. In Africa, he visits small farmers who have no role in the food economy or are even aware of the system.
Roberts covers a lot of ground for readers who are interested in a purely qualitative approach to the global food economy. He starts with a concise overview of the history of the early food economy and man’s carnivorous origin, and the first agricultural revolutions and famines, to the rise of industrialized food production and the large grocery companies that ultimately seized control of the supply chain and changed food production and food itself.
In his frightening and vivid chapter on food-borne diseases, Roberts explains that despite advances in production, preservation and packaging, food-borne diseases continue to strike one in four Americans every year. Despite assurances from companies and the FDA, we learn that certain pathogens such as listeria and salmonella have become more prevalent, pathogenic, and resistant to antibiotics.
Key participants within the food economy will scoff at Roberts’ dire analysis and continue to paint a rosy picture of expanding grain supplies, higher yields, a declining food insecurity, and rising per capita increase of meat.
However, Roberts neatly sums up the food predicament with the following passage:
A system so focused on cost reduction and rising volume that it makes a billion of us fat, lets another billion go hungry, and all but invites food-born pathogens to become global epidemics is now running into other problems as well. Arable land is growing scarcer, inputs like pesticides and synthetic nitrogen fertilizers are increasingly expensive. Soil degradation and erosion from hyperintensive farming is costing millions of acres of farmland a year. Water supplies are being rapidly depleted in parts of the world, even as the rising of petroleum—the lifeblood of industrial agriculture—is calling into question the entire agribusiness model.
The question Roberts asks isn’t “whether we’ll be able to feed 9.5 billion by 2070, but how long we can continue to meet the demands of the 6.5 billion alive today.”
For that comment alone, those waiting for the sky to fall will probably jump up and down with excitement that someone understands what they’ve been saying all along and point to recent events. For example, in Africa, prices of some staple foods increased more than 50% in a matter of a week and in Somalia riots broke out because the increasing price of rice. It’s not only developing poor countries that have been hit. In late April, Wal-Mart announced that it would be rationing rice because of recent “supply and demand trends.” According to the Thai Rice Exporters Association, the price of rice—a primary food source for the majority of the human population around the world—rose to $894 a metric ton in comparison to $327 a ton in the same month last year. This increase has been blamed on poor harvests, bad weather, and countries curbing exports.
Optimists like Norman Borlaug, godfather of the Green Revolution, insist, however, that the opportunity to crush a food crisis lies in transgenic crops and new farming techniques. Most of these positive forecasts for future food supplies assume new technologies, but as Roberts points out, even the optimists acknowledge that if these advances don’t materialize soon “the entire food economy could gradually slip back into a state of demographic disequilibrium where productivity is once again in a race with population growth and where the most heavily populated countries compete for access to large surpluses of grain and soybeans, just as industrialized nations now compete for oil.”
Despite the gloomy truths he presents throughout, Roberts offers in his epilogue solutions that range from strengthening regional food systems to reducing the high consumption rate of meat. For readers who want to understand the complex issues of the global food economy The End of Food is a compelling, but tough to swallow, must read.
Rebeca Schiller is a marketing communications consultant and an aspiring novelist who lives in Brooklyn, NY. When she isn’t writing press releases or pitching clients to reporters, she’s agonizing over her novel, Julius, and writing book reviews. Rebeca is a history buff and her current interests include: The Spanish Civil War, the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the McCarthy witch hunts, the Rosenberg case, and anything having to do with Spanish Civil War veteran, novelist, and Hollywood Ten member Alvah Bessie.
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