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The End of Food | 
| Author: Paul Roberts
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Rating:  11 reviews
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
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| 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 Not Malthus, Any More Than Climatologist Hansen is Chicken Little August 26, 2008
Lesley Thomas (the ether)
1 out of 1 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).
 Decent book, badly edited August 13, 2008
Jack in Oswego (Portland, OR)
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.
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