The Grist on The End of Food

Paul Roberts’ first book, The End of Oil, was called by Bill McKibben “perhaps the best single book ever produced about our energy economy and its environmental implications.”

Having anticipated the energy crisis, Roberts has turned his attention to what we eat. His new book, The End of Food, is reviewed by Tom Philpott in The Grist:

By switching from oil to food, Roberts has boldly stepped into a crowded field. In the last decade, books by Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, and many others have helped revive public awareness about food production here in what Schlosser aptly dubbed the “fast-food nation.” Collectively, these books documented the nearly unchecked way our food industry exploits workers, the environment, and farm animals; and how, tragically, these efforts result in ever more nutritionally vapid and heavily marketed food “choices” (which end up consisting mainly of clever combinations of corn and soybeans). These books also ably teased out the government’s role in the food industry’s rise — both through perverse farm-support policies and the craven co-optation of would-be guardians of public health such as the FDA and the USDA.

Philpott says the book is “the kind of work you wish policy makers and presidential candidates were grappling with, but you’re pretty sure they’re not.” It deserves to be read.

Among other goods, it challenges the idealized locavore solution and describes an emergent geopolitical landscape of food:

Robert’s historical frame drives home a key point that his predecessors didn’t quite nail down: In many ways, modern food production is an attractive response to centuries of chronic food insecurity. Who wants to spend nearly all of one’s income on food, and rely on sugared tea as a key source of calories, as did the 19th-century British working class? Who wants to spend hours a day preparing food as peasant women did, not by choice but for survival? By the dawn of the 20th century, people quite understandably longed for food security and freedom from drudgery. The modern food system — for all of the new problems it created — largely met those desires, at least in the United States and Europe. The locavore movement will eventually have to confront them head on.

Meanwhile, the task of feeding the world will only grow more burdensome as global population expands, fossil-fuel supplies wane, and the climate changes. Roberts is at his best discussing the geopolitical consequences as the world’s most economically powerful nations scramble to respond to these challenges. He shows that the U.S. agricultural machine once dominated global food-crop production, acting as a kind of OPEC of grain. But now Brazil, spurred on by the need to repay debt to foreign lenders, is rapidly emerging as the globe’s food-export powerhouse. Brazil already leads the world in production of sugar, coffee, and beef, and will soon overtake the United States in soybean production. The country’s soy farms “are expanding at the rate of 4,000 square miles per year,” and its soy exports have more than tripled since 1998. China, flush with export earnings and pushed by an increasingly meat-hungry population, is sucking up a huge portion of that bounty and using it as livestock feed.

Roberts senses the “emergence of a new global [food] trade axis, with Brazil and Argentina at one end and India and China at the other.” The main role the United States plays in this new order is through U.S.-based transnationals like Cargill, Monsanto, Tyson, and Mosaic — which have maintained their dominance of food production through these geopolitical shifts. The consequences aren’t pretty. On the China side, you get the rise of U.S.-style meat factories, and all of the environmental damage they imply; on the Brazil side, you get ever-increasing pressure on the Amazon rainforest, the globe’s greatest carbon sink, in an era of rapid climate change.