The End of Food

The End of Food follows on Paul Roberts' End of Oil. Ok, so this guy seems to be finding a lot of ends of things, so isn't this just an exaggeration? Sadly, no. With the same comprehensive, reportorial style as his fantastic The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World, Roberts delivers a compelling and chilling view of where things are headed in the world of the food all of us eat every day. Nuances, details, linkages and causalities are all explored dispassionately and fairly. You might think of this book as just another apocalyptic view of the world. There are plenty of dark views to be had on the bookshelf, to be sure. But End of Food is as complete, solid and factual as End of Oil. I read End of Oil when it came out in 2005. Many of its observations, predictions, and revelations, were dismissed by many as overblown and sensational. Some were difficult to understand and accept. But three and a half years later, his observations are widely accepted. End of Food has the same quality -- one can hardly complete this book without having a deep and important understanding of one of the most basic elements of the human race. This is a must-read book for anyone who would like to peek into the future -- and take some actions now that will benefit not just the environment, but your health and well being. Roberts has done it again.

This is a most thoght-provoking book. I was introduced to it through an interview with the author on NPR and was intrigued because he had written The End of Oil a few years ago and was pretty much spot on about what has transpired. Food - its production, consumption, history, etc. - is so well-covered in this book that I can never, ever think about food in the same light, or not think about it for that matter.

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.

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 .

This is the second "The End of Food" in a series; the first The End of Food, by Thomas Pawlick, was published in 2006. Paul Roberts, a "resource journalist" has also written The End of Oil, published in 2005. This time, Roberts 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 will never achieve mass production of quality food without an unacceptable loss of calories. The tradeoff is much steeper than is commonly known. We tend to be unaware because as a society we care about entertainment as opposed to making informed choices. In this work, Roberts contributes to what I call "Declinist Literature". This genre is currently concerned with the un-sustainability of the world economic order with a focus on America and often drawing on information about the fall of empires past, particularly the Roman Empire. Roberts is one of the edgier voices of Declinism today - he thinks we're in for a radical population decline. The problem, according to Roberts, is that ever-cheaper food provided supply stability for a very long time and that the period of prolonged stability is now ending, ushering in famine and political instability on a grand scale. If Roberts is correct, the food industry will 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 in the world. 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 we saw in The End of Oil, we almost certainly do not have even a half-decade before total world oil extraction begins to decline, if it hasn't already. Therefore we should not be surprised by rising food prices, and we might even be forced to hope that world demand for oil declines steadily over time. The 70s inflation was associated with peak oil in the U.S. This time it's the world that is peaking in oil production, with enormous implications for worldwide food prices. The vision is that we will all have to spend a lot of time in long lines to buy cheap foodish-shaped items loaded with corn syrup, trans fat, soy emulsifiers, processed cheese, sugar, added dyes, sodium nitrite (to preserve freshness) and glutaraldehyde (kills insects). To further the vision, identification cards will be required to authenticate food purchased in stores. Eventually, all the store identification cards will inform a common database and it will be possible to implement food rationing for items experiencing shortages. When this happens, there will be different