Customer Reviews

Food Energy and Society: Revised Edition

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This book changed the way I think about... food, energy, and society more than any other book I've read. There are plenty of books out there giving alarmist information about our energy use, our food production systems, and the impact of these on society, but this book actually gives you the real facts, allowing you to understand the big picture and see for yourself why there is such a big problem.

The information is drawn from what seem to be very rigorous studies and is presented in a logical manner that helps guide the reader through what otherwise might be slightly inaccessible material. There are lots of numbers in this book, but Pimentel and Pimentel explain them in a context that makes sense to the layperson.

Highlights of this book:
(1) Did you ever wonder how much energy is used by a hunter-gatherer to collect their food, compared against the energy they get from it? And how does this compare to early agriculture when we started employing animals (should be more efficient, right?) And then how this compares to the energy input/output ratio of our modern food production system? This book explains it.
(2) Did you ever wonder how much energy is used for processing, packaging, and delivering food from the farms to our tables? Have you ever heard the rule of thumb that meat takes 10x as much energy to produce than grains? What is the environmental effect of these issues? This book finally makes this understandable.

If you want to read a book that simultaneously presents detailed data while also giving you a clear, big-picture view of our world, then I highly recommend this book.

This is a fabulous, factual, "scientific" text for anyone serious about the issue of global warming and food issues. For example it gets into the issues of why the carbon footprint costs of red meat are so high. And why ethanol from corn or other foodstocks simply does not work. Fabulous, fabulous book!