The End of Food | 
 enlarge | Author: Paul Roberts
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $12.49
You Save: $13.51 (52%)
New (49) Used (16) from $12.49
Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 11903
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 416
Number Of Items: 1
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
Tell A Friend
Add to Wishlist
Add to Wedding Registry
Add to Baby Registry
| |
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Paul Roberts, the 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 need is failing.
In this carefully researched, vivid narrative, Roberts lays out the stark economic realities behind modern food and shows how our system of 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 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. While nearly one billion people worldwide are overweight or obese, the same number of people?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 five million children permanently blind.
Meanwhile, the shift to heavily mechanized, chemically intensive farming has so compromised soil and water that it's unclear how long such output can be maintained. And just as we've begun to understand the limits of our abundance, the burgeoning economies of Asia, with their rising middle classes, are adopting Western-style, meat-heavy diets, putting new demands on global food supplies.
Comprehensive in scope and full of fresh insights, The End of Food presents a lucid, stark vision of the future. It is a call for us to make crucial decisions to help us survive the demise of food production as we know it.
Paul Roberts is the author of The End of Oil, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award in 2005. He has written about resource economics and politics for numerous publications, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Harper's Magazine, and Rolling Stone, and lectures frequently on business and environmental issues.
|
| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
Heavy Reading November 25, 2008
Erika Mitchell (E. Calais, VT USA)
This book is an investigation of the modern industrial food economy. Roberts came to the topic with a long-standing interest in economics, which is reflected throughout the book. The book is divided into three sections, covering the history of industrial food production, the problems that such a food system brings about, and possible alternatives or improvements for future food production. Roberts considers a wide range of topics, from rising populations in need of more food to environmental degradation to genetic engineering. Sources are cited with endnotes listed by chapter at the end of the book.
Roberts takes the history of our food economy all the way back to Australopithecus, and he argues for the evolutionary advantages of adding meat to the diet. He traces the development of agriculture and seed selection, and compares improvement in agricultural yield to increases in population, noting that population growth always outstrips growth in agricultural yield, which results in declining nutrition. In the modern food economy, he notes that producers now need to resort to added value in order to increase profitability, and he examines the changes this approach has brought about in our relationship with food.
Roberts' description of the problems brought about by our global food economy is quite chilling. He comments "the cheapness of Chinese food is a reflection of the billions of dollars that have yet to be spent on improved safety." He goes on to write "Because our global industrialized food system is now so tightly integrated and interdependent, so reliant on the constant flows of material between regions and the ceaseless transactions among input industries, producers processors, and distributors, there is no longer the possibility of discrete failure: a collapse in one part of the system will have extraordinary ramifications for everyone else."
Roberts considers both sides of the genetically modified foods, discussing some of the problems with genetically modified seed escaping into the wild and the loss of genetic diversity that goes along with the concentration of food seed suppliers, but he also argues that measures as extreme as genetic engineering may be necessary in order to supply food for future populations. He examines the local foods movement and finds it unrealistic as a solution for addressing environmental problems, since he feels it is unrealistic for concentrated urban areas to rely on solely local food suppliers, or potentially unhealthy if animals are raised in close proximity to crowded urban centers (because of the risk of potent viral diseases jumping species). Roberts sees the food economy as being endangered, at risk of catastrophic collapse from a variety of stresses. Even after reading the book, I'm not quite convinced that a food disaster is looming, but the issues he explores are well worth being informed about.
 Required reading if you care about food November 24, 2008
Jorge Madrazo (Nutley, NJ United States)
Just to echo other reviews. Food has been too easy over the last few decades. Be prepared for the problems in the near future.
Once again, Roberts Delivers (and it's not hyperbole) November 15, 2008
tomh (Newton, MA United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
The End of Food September 9, 2008
Deborah O'Shea (Buffalo, NY, USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
Not Malthus, Any More Than Climatologist Hansen is Chicken Little August 26, 2008
Lesley Thomas (the ether)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
I agree this is among the very best of this century's "Declinist Literature". Although the author covers a lot of problematic ground, from avian flu to bioengineering to obesity, what sticks with me the most is his urgent Cassandra alarm about the looming danger of worldwide famine.
Those who poo poo Roberts as "Malthusian" should read more carefully the section with Malthus, who was writing his doomsday predictions at a time when the whole New World still lay there rich in topsoil, ripe for takeover by millions of starving European farmers. Sure, Malthus was proven wrong - at that time - but he would've been correct if the New World hadn't been quickly deforested/deprairied and farmed to feed teeming Europe. There is no frontier left, (the Amazon is the last big frontier left on Earth to be cleared and farmed, and we all know about that grim scenario),everywhere soils are massively depleted and threatened by flood, pests and drought from climate change, while our addiction to natural gas derived fertilizer is a recipe for major famines when the pipelines are cut off by war or peak oil. There is little water left in China, India and many other regions, which - as Roberts shows - import water indirectly in the form of grain from those that still have water. But anway, how is it "Malthusian" to point out rationally that fecund soil has peaked all over the Earth?
Recommended to go with it is Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture
Perhaps Roberts was hastily edited or not edited(for example, "eighteen hundred years ago" instead of "eighteen thousand years" in the section on Cro Magnon diet. Yet readers should realize that many major publishers no longer use copy editors and sometimes agents without training in editing are now asked to do the job without pay, so get used to errors and typos).
|
|
|
