The End of Food: The Coming Crisis in the World Food Industry by Paul Roberts
Bloomsbury, £8.99
In his famous treatise of 1798, An Essay on the Principle of Population, the Anglican clergyman and political economist Thomas Robert Malthus argued that the human population of this planet would always be “checked” – his polite euphemism for “starved” – by the failure of food supplies to keep pace with the growth of population.
For a long time – for most of the 19th century and for the first half of the 20th – it rather looked as if Malthus was right. But then, at least in Western Europe and North America, it began to look as if we’d cracked the problem. Populations in the developed world have grown enormously over the last 200 years, but so has the supply of food. As Paul Roberts writes: “The modern food system was celebrated as a monument to humanity’s greatest triumph. We were producing more food – more grain, more meat, more fruit and more vegetables – than ever before, more cheaply than ever before, and with a degree of variety, safety, quality and convenience that preceding generations would have found bewildering.” The world seemed to have walked away from the long shadows cast by the Malthusian theory of a long night of drudgery and hunger.
Now those Malthusian “dark tints” are back. Roberts, who writes about resource economics and politics for publications such as the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s and Rolling Stone, and is the author of The End of Oil, argues that the era of cheap food – and abundant food – is over. He says “the emergence of large scale food production gave us unprecedented abundance – but at a steep and ultimately unsustainable price. Relentless cost-cutting has made our food systems vulnerable to contamination and disease. More than a billion people are overweight or obese, yet roughly the same number are malnourished. Overcrowded countries like China are already planning for tightened global food supplies as the world veers back to a time of uncertainty and hunger.”
He traces and analyses the origins and development of our food system – from field to fork – from the first agricultural revolution to the industrialisation of food and retail after the Second World War. He writes: “As we give more and more control of the food we eat to large profiteering companies in the name of convenience, the food itself is becoming less nutritious. The result – obesity, diabetes and other health problems which experts predict will be the biggest drain on public health services by 2030.”
This reached its apotheosis with Frankenstein food – genetically-modified crops which no one (except a few dodgy chemical companies and their chums in the “new” Labour project) wants and which, in the long run, threatens us all. You don’t see people marching on Parliament demanding the opportunity to eat genetically-modified food. But you do see the scientists, the food processors and the supermarkets trying to sneak the products onto the shelves without telling us.
Think of this book as part of a literary meal: if Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, which revealed the truth about mechanically-retrieved meat and the bits of brains, balls and excrement in the average burger, was the starter; and Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System was the main course; then The End of Food is the dessert.
All three authors argue that the system of food production in the developed world – in Western Europe and North America – is in serious and urgent need of radical change. In his prologue to this book, Roberts describes how E.coli found in bags of fresh spinach from farms in the Salinas Valley, California, killed three people and sickened 200 others in 2006. The E.coli was traced to the guts of a wild boar which brought the bacteria in from a neighbouring ranch. Yes, industrial farming means that even vegetarians can now enjoy the benefits of intensive meat production.
Lucy Knox
