The End of Food | 
| Author: Paul Roberts
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $16.04
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Avg. Customer Rating:  6 reviews
Sales Rank: 2501
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
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
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business 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: Read 1 more reviews...
 Super-concentrated and pretty fun to read too July 1, 2008
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
I am really enjoying this book. The current rice shortage and e-coli outbreaks were topics I wanted to better understand, and that's what got me interested (and it has certainly helped illuminate those topics for me). But I'm finding the whole thing fascinating. Each chapter is a carefully-constructed, highly-readable nugget of history, research and personal accounts. Roberts' descriptions of his visits to China, Africa, pig farms, chicken ranches, etc. make the historical narrative all the more persuasive. He is deft at zeroing in on the ironic and bizarre. One of my favorite chapters is a walk through the evolution of human food consumption. He manages to cover thousands of years of eating history in a few concise, satisfying pages (not a small task). Glad I bought this book.
food problems June 25, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
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.
 More alarmism June 22, 2008
5 out of 31 found this review helpful
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.
Shortages and Possible Epidemics Coming! June 20, 2008
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
"The End of Food" provides a good background on a number of current and future problems involving modern food production.
Roberts believes that the problem of food safety is getting out of control, per recent examples of spinach, peanut butter, hamburger, pet food, and tomatoes. Rising food prices due to increased growth of biofuels and rising energy prices present another serious problem. The world is also increasingly encountering severe weather due to man-made climate change, decreasing availability of water supplies, and increased food demand due to those in developing nations now being able to afford Western-style diets heavy on beef (requires about 7 lbs. grain/lb. of cattle). American meat consumption levels could only be supported for 40% of the existing world population.
Wal-Mart's 21% market share in food is credited with pushing grocery prices down 9% since 1985, as well as average wages down 2.2%. Successful competitors often go upscale, and offer takeout (41% margins, about twice those in cosmetics), though Wal-Mart is moving in this direction as well.
Positive trends include increased chicken production (about 3X more efficient than beef - less feed, time-to-market (40 days, vs. 70 in the 1970s), and inedible proportion. Fish are even more efficient - about 1/3 are now "farmed."
America's obesity epidemic began in the 1980s, and is partly due to less physical jobs. Another factor has been the greater impact of food innovations on lower priced foods with greater caloric impact - thus, a greater impact on the poor. (Roberts does not comment on their likely greater problems with depression-linked eating, possibly aggravated by an increasingly difficult economy.) Then there's the aggressive marketing of super-sizing, schools turning over lunch programs to fast-food vendors, allowing vending machines on campus, and ads aimed at children.
Government farm supports have led to the U.S. becoming a high-cost producer, yet allowing U.S. farmer to export corn for 27% less than the cost to produce it. (Similarly, with other crops.) Mexico's agriculture production has suffered since NAFTA allowed our below-cost imports - low-productivity jobs have often been replaced by zero-productivity unemployment for farm workers. Meanwhile, the U.S. food-trade balance went negative in 2004, and Brazil is currently using only a fifth of its arable land base of over 1 million square miles.
African food production is far from a success story. Nine-hundred million are malnourished, and another billion suffer chronic nutrient deficiencies. Resistance to change is a problem - one example is farmer reluctance to replace maize (not drought-resistant) with other crops; government corruption is another. Still another is the spread of a new form of wheat rust.
Food safety is better than decades ago, but is highly vulnerable to fast transmission - especially involving new bugs and viruses. Tracking sources is difficult - one study found the average 4 oz. hamburger has meat from 55 cows. This is even more difficult in Asia, with its large numbers of duck and chicken producers, as well as their links with wild birds.
Crop-yield increases/acre are down to slightly over 1%/year - half that of before, while fertilizer and transport costs are greatly up. Agriculture accounts for about 70% of U.S. nitrous-oxide - a greenhouse pollutant 300X more potent than CO2. Our food production accounts for about 20% of U.S. energy use, and about 75% of all freshwater use. Genetic energy fears, on the other hand, seem totally unfounded.
Finally, Roberts' conclusions are supported by a New York Times 6/21/08 article on India: Groundwater has been depleted at alarming rates, changes in temperature and rain patterns could diminish agricultural output by 30 percent by the 2080s (per Peterson Institute for International Economics).
Bottom-Line: Malthus and Erlich are likely to be proven correct when world population reaches 9 billion, if not sooner.
A superb wake up call June 7, 2008
18 out of 19 found this review helpful
Roberts essentially shows why the present,agribusiness based ,large farm,industrial factory approach to food production, that relies primarily on oil based fertilizers,herbicides,insecticides,fungicides,and pesticides ,is not sustainable .The world has a major food problem RIGHT NOW.This factory approach to food production is breaking down primarily because the price of a barrel of oil is currently at $139.However,the problem was visible even when oil was priced at $75 a barrel.The current "modern" chemical and oil based approach was designed for a food production system where the price of a barrel of oil was at $15-$20 a barrel.The costs of chemical farming are going through the roof as the price of a barrel of oil continues to skyrocket upward. Other factors are exacerbating the problem.First,it takes about 8 pounds of grain to make 1 pound of red meat from cows.Rising incomes in countries like China and India are leading to a increased preference for more red meat consumption in the diets of people in those countries.This new added demand is starting to raise the price of all of the food chain elements.Second,the biofuels(like ethenol) emphasis is a blunder.Biofuels do not substantially reduce the dependence on imported oil for the USA and merely reduce the supply available for food production for people to eat.Third,the current economic subsidization of agribusiness by the tax payer in America is simply multiplying the problem.Third World farmers are going out of business in large numbers as imported and subsidized American grain undermines their ability to feed their populations locally.Fourth, the current diet based on meat consumption is causing more and more farm land to be converted to ranch ,grazing land,further reducing the supply of grain and increasing the demand for grain to feed the herds.This is also contributing to rising world prices.Fifth,factor in global warming ,droughts in Australia and California,constant civil wars and revolutions in Africa,decreasing amounts of rainfall,overpumping of underground aquifers,desertification,continuing losses in topsoil,and you have a recipe for a potential collapse in the world wide food supply RIGHT NOW.
Some of the solutions are to eat locally(farmer's markets,organic foods),emphasize more fruits and vegetables in the average diet, and substantially cut back on the amount of meat that is consumed .
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