The End of Food | 
| Author: Paul Roberts
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 4947
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 416
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 0618606238
Dewey Decimal Number: 363.8
EAN: 9780618606238
ASIN: 0618606238
Publication Date: June 4, 2008 (In 15 Days)
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Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews:
The End of Real Food May 19, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The End of Food (not to be confused with another book with the same title published in 2006) is the story of the interplay between economics, technology, the natural world and politics as applied to the food industry. Paul Roberts, a "resource journalist" has also written The End of Oil, published in 2005. This time, Roberts carefully explains how we've become used to a food industry that efficiently delivers an abundance of calories with less and less nutrition. What's more, we might never achieve mass production of quality food without an unacceptable loss of calories. The tradeoff is much steeper than commonly known.
In this work, Roberts contributes to what is now called "Decilinist Literature". This genre is concerned with the un-sustainability of the world economic order, usually with a focus on America's place in the world. Roberts adds to the edgier voices of Declinism. He seems to tell us that humanity is about to experience a radical population decline. The problem, according to Roberts, is that ever cheaper food provided supply stability for a very long time, and that this prolonged stability is now leading toward instability.
In fact, if Roberts is correct, the food industry might be unable to maintain supply even if quality can be further sacrificed. About one-fifth of all U.S. energy use goes into the food system, not even counting the fuel required to get food to market. Also, water tables are in decline in many agricultural areas and long-term drought appears to be setting into other regions. The lifting and transporting of water to productive land will require increasing amounts of energy. The food industry has become too dependent on increasingly scarce inputs such as fossil fuels and water and we should expect widespread famines within the next several years. As Roberts explained in his first book, we do not have even a decade before total world oil extraction begins to decline, if it hasn't already. Therefore the rise in food prices can be expected to accelerate.
A lot of people in the world can't afford even the cheapest food anymore. The End of Food explains how different nations have responded thus far to the failure of the food complex to maintain the supply of cheap food. The policy responses in general are not encouraging as they do little to change the way that food is produced and transported. For example, livestock continues to be kept confined in overcrowded pens far from large single-crop farms that grow high-yield corn that feeds them. All these animals generate manure in such quantities as to defy the imagination. Apparently, hogs are particularly prolific, and their waste runs off into large poop lagoons that cannot be properly contained and do not fertilize the cropland. Further, the crowded confinement of animals as well as the volume of empty calories fed to them necessitates the use of ever-increasing quantities of antibiotics. This is a downward-quality spiral and a major cause of diabetes and obesity.
Roberts warns of an empty calorie type of starvation, obesity without hope as nutritious food gets too expensive for most people. He warns of the consequences of waiting too long to be able to implement an acceptable solution. If we wait too long, some solution set will be imposed on us involuntarily, and it probably won't be anything that we would have chosen voluntarily.
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