92 of 96 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The End of Real Food, May 19, 2008
This review is from: The End of Food (Hardcover)
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 have cared about entertainment as opposed to making informed choices. But that appears to be changing.
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 - according to the book.
As we saw in The End of Oil, we very well might be close to "peak oil." That's the point in time when the maximum rate of global petroleum extraction is reached. Therefore we should not be surprised by rising food prices over time and after extreme volatility.
The 70s inflation was associated with peak oil in the U.S. This time it's the world that is expected to peak, with implications for worldwide food prices over the long run.
One vision is that people will one day have to spend a lot of time in 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). I think this is an overly pessimistic vision mainly because citizens are becoming increasingly aware of nutrition.
To further the dark vision, identification cards would 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 classes of uniform store identification cards. A food rationing program will not be designed to ensure equality for all. By definition, inequality will exist when there are shortages. Now that's stuff for a scary movie!
A lot of people in the world cannot readily afford even the cheapest food. The End of Food explains how different nations have prepared for the possibility of a crisis. Policy responses are not encouraging as they haven't changed the way food is produced and transported, which is what Roberts wants to see changed.
The packaging, transport and marketing of food has increased in intensity while there is no wholesale move toward quality. For example, livestock continues to be kept confined in overcrowded pens far from large single-crop farms (high-yield corn) that feed 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, living in their own waste, 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.
Antibiotics are added to cattle and chicken feed to prevent them from getting sick as a result of overcrowded and filthy conditions. Antibiotics also save cows from fatal sickness resulting from their calorie-rich diet of corn. Less well known is the fact that the antibiotics speeds the growth of these animals because it causes them to absorb more energy from their feed. But the reliance on antibiotics to deliver cheap meat and poultry is not without other consequences.
70% of antibiotics administered in America end up in agriculture. This has given rise to antibiotic-resistant bacteria. These bacteria, often called "superbugs," are carried into homes on contaminated meat and poultry, and from there they are carried into hospitals. Hospital staffs are now forced to constantly clean everything with bleach in an effort to stay on top of the situation.
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.
It has been two years since the last "The End of Food" was published. Let's hope we get another in the series within the same time increment. Food is one of the central topics within Declinist Literature.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Decent book, badly edited, August 12, 2008
This review is from: The End of Food (Hardcover)
Robert's "End of Food" includes a lot of good information, but there are probably 200 places where a good editor would've challenged the author to reword or tighten up the manuscript. I wonder whether his editor even read the book carefully, or whether he/she knew enough about the subject to properly edit it. A few examples of the issues I'm talking about:
At the beginning of the book Roberts lays out a ridiculously simplified, linear reductionist theory of the role meat consumption played in man's history (except that he rolls it out as fact rather than no small amount of speculation).
There are a number of factual inaccuracies that should've been caught or at least reworded. Example: He states that meat is easier to digest than plant foods, which in many cases is simply wrong. Cooked rice, for example, is half-digested before it's even in the stomach.
Three times Roberts refers to soil as dirt. In 45 years I've never heard a farmer (or any agricultural specialist) refer to soil (in a field)as "dirt". This carelessness on Robert's part is enough to make thoughtful readers question whether he's been shoddy in other areas too. There are at least a dozen places where he refers to animal manure as poop, which is just plain silly, and makes Roberts sound like a goofball. Imagine if physicians referred to a laceration as a "Bo-Bo" in a medical report, not once, but 12 times? Could you take him seriously?
Roberts is very very loose with his date references. Sometimes he's wrong. On p. 118 he states "By the late 1960s the U.S. was in deep economic trouble......having lost it manufacturing lead to low-cost rivals like Japan...." But in fact in the late 60s very little U.S. manufacturing had shifted to Japan. Roberts is only about 15 years off there.
Then, on page 152 he writes, "...by the late 1980s....African output faltered;...The timing couldn't have been worse. Just as Africans were producing fewer bushels [in the late 80s], a new glut of grain , unleashed by Butz's "fence row to fence row" policy, sent prices plummeting". The problem with this is that Butz's fence row policy was implemented in 1971, almost 20 years before the African output faltered, which is many years too much lapsed time to have had a meaningful direct effect.
Finally, what possible reason is there for a 26 page prologue in a general interest book such as this? 26 pages! Where was Robert's editor? If a writer's proposing a 26 page prologue, there's at least a chapter missing in the body of the book.
All in all I enjoyed the book, although it's not nearly as well-written as Pollan's food books.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A superb wake up call, June 7, 2008
This review is from: The End of Food (Hardcover)
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 .
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
