Paul Roberts - From "The End Of Oil" To "The End Of Food" - NYT

[hatrack]

Paul Roberts’s prophetic and well-received 2004 book, “The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World,” anticipated the current energy crisis. Now he’s moved on to what we put in our mouths. Roberts’s new book, “The End of Food,” which takes into account a vertiginous pile of recent developments — including the so-called tortilla riots of 2007, during which thousands took to the Mexico City streets to protest the rapidly rising cost of maize — may prove no less prescient.

A contributor to Harper’s and other magazines, Roberts sketches a dire present and ponders a bleak future. Readers with a sci-fi bent might, upon completing this book, decide that the 1973 film “Soylent Green” should no longer be viewed as merely a schlocky doomsday vehicle for Charlton Heston, but as an almost plausible peek at the year 2022, when global warming and overpopulation have rendered the earth inhospitable to most plants and animals, and steak and strawberries are black market goods consumed only by the super-rich.

We have reached the end of the “golden age” of food, Roberts writes. No longer do the things we eat “grow only more plentiful, more secure, more nutritious and simply better with each passing year.” Instead, E. coli outbreaks “have almost become an annual autumn ritual,” and a new day is arriving when “cost and convenience are dominant, the social meal is obsolete” and the act of eating has “devolved into an exercise in irritation, confusion and guilt.”

Roberts’s worst-case scenario isn’t tomatoes devoid of taste. It’s a “perfect storm of sequential or even simultaneous food-related calamities.” Climate change and spiraling population growth have him wondering not just “whether we’ll be able to feed 9.5 billion people by 2070, but how long we can continue to meet the demands of the 6.5 billion alive today.”

EDIT

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/books/review/Edge-t.html?_r=2&8bu&emc=bua2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

[XemaSab]

1. The punch line is at the end:

The Reviewer:

John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, is general editor of “Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food Writing.”

And on edit: Damn, I want me some chili and cornbread for dinner! :9

[Terry in Austin]

2. Roberts makes a common mistake

He's asking, as do many in discussions about population, "How do we get more food to feed this growing population?"

It's the same as asking "How do we get more fuel to feed this growing fire?" Well, it doesn't grow on its own.

Population exploded when oil-based factory farming came along and dramatically increased the food supply. Longer term, as food supply decreases, so does population. Harsh, but not real complicated.

(But, but -- what about medical advances, sanitation, Kleenex! A little, yeah, but it's mainly about food.)

[Tumbulu]

3. Plus no one ever talks about how there are so few farmers left

and how long it really takes to know the land one farms and then how long it takes to use that knowledge to produce crops in a sustainable way.