The global food market fosters both scarcity and overconsumption,
while imperilling the planet=92s ability to produce food in the future.
In his =93Essay on the Principle of Population,=94 of 1798, the English
parson Thomas Malthus insisted that human populations would always be
=93checked=94 (a polite word for mass starvation) by the failure of food
supplies to keep pace with population growth. For a long time, it
looked as if what Malthus called the =93dark tints=94 of his argument were
unduly, even absurdly, pessimistic. As Paul Roberts writes in =93The End
of Food=94 (Houghton Mifflin; $26), =93Until late in the twentieth
century, the modern food system was celebrated as a monument to
humanity=92s greatest triumph. We were producing more food=97more grain,
more meat, more fruits and vegetables=97than ever before, more cheaply
than ever before, and with a degree of variety, safety, quality and
convenience that preceding generations would have found bewildering.=94
The world seemed to have been liberated from a Malthusian =93long night
of hunger and drudgery.=94
Now the =93dark tints=94 have returned. The World Bank recently announced
that thirty-three countries are confronting food crises, as the prices
of various staples have soared. From January to April of this year,
the cost of rice on the international market went up a hundred and
forty-one per cent. Pakistan has reintroduced ration cards. In Egypt,
the Army has started baking bread for the general population. The
Haitian Prime Minister was ousted after hunger riots. The current
crisis could push another hundred million people deeper into poverty.
Is the world=92s population about to be =93checked=94 by its failure to
produce enough food?
Paul Roberts is the second author in the past couple of years to
publish a book entitled =93The End of Food=94=97the first, by Thomas F.
Pawlick, appeared in 2006. Pawlick, an investigative journalist from
Ontario, was concerned with such predicaments as the end of the tasty
tomato and its replacement by =93red tennis balls=94 lacking in both
flavor and nutrients. (The modern tomato, he re****ted, contains far
less calcium and Vitamin A than its 1963 counterpart.) These worries
seem rather tame compared with Roberts=92s; his book grapples with the
possible termination of food itself, and its replacement by=97what?
Cormac McCarthy=92s novel =93The Road=94 contains a vision of a future in
which just about the only food left is canned, from happier times;
when the cans run out, the humans eat one another. Roberts lacks
McCarthy=92s Biblical cadences, but his narrative is intended to be no
less terrifying.
Roberts=92s work is part of a second wave of food-politics books, which
has taken the genre to a new level of apocalyptic foreboding. The
first wave was led by Eric Schlosser=92s =93Fast Food Nation=94 (2001),
and
focussed on the perils of junk food. =93Fast Food Nation=94 painted an
alarming picture=97one learned about the additives in a strawberry
milkshake, the traces of excrement in hamburger meat=97but it also left
some readers with a feeling of mild complacency, as they closed the
book and turned to a wholesome supper of spinach and ricotta
tortellini. There is no such reassurance to be had from the new wave,
in which Roberts=92s book is joined by =93Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden
Battle for the World Food System,=94 by Raj Patel (Melville House;
$19.95); =93Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vani****ng
Seafood,=94 by Taras Grescoe (Bloomsbury; $24.99); and =93In Defense of
Food: An Eater=92s Manifesto,=94 by Michael Pollan, the poet of the group
(Penguin Press; $21.95).
All of these authors agree that the entire system of Western food
production is in need of radical change, right down to the spinach.
Roberts opens with a description of E.-coli-infected spinach from
California, which killed three people in 2006 and sickened two hundred
others. The E. coli was traced to the guts of a wild boar that may
have tracked the bug in from a nearby cattle ranch. Industrial farming
means that even those on a vegan diet may reap the nastier effects of
intensive meat production. It is no longer enough for individuals to
switch to =93healthier=94 choices in the supermarket. Schlosser asked his
readers to consider the chain of consequences they set in motion every
time they sit down to eat in a fast-food outlet. Roberts wants us to
consider the =93chain of transactions and reactions=94 represented by each
of our food purchases=97=93by each ripe melon or freshly baked bagel, by
each box of cereal or tray of boneless skinless chicken breasts.=94 This
time, we are all implicated.
Like Malthus, Roberts sees humanity increasingly struggling to meet
its food needs. He predicts that in the next forty years, as
agriculture is threatened by climate change, =93demand for food will
rise precipitously,=94 outstripping supply. The reasons for this,
however, are not strictly Malthusian. For Malthus, famine was
inevitable because the math of human existence did not add up: the
means of subsistence grew only arithmetically (1, 2, 3), whereas
population grew geometrically (2, 4, 8). By this analysis, food
production could never catch up with fertility. Malthus was wrong, on
both counts. In his treatise, Malthus couldn=92t envisage any
innovations for increasing yield beyond =93dressing=94 the soil with
cattle manure. In the decades after he wrote, farmers in England took
advantage of new machinery, powerful fertilizers, and higher-yield
seeds, and supply rose faster than demand. As the availability of food
increased, and people became more prosperous, fertility fell.
Malthus could not have imagined that demand might increase
catastrophically even where populations were static or falling. The
problem is not just the number of mouths to feed; it=92s the quantity of
food that each mouth consumes when there are no natural constraints.
As the world becomes richer, people eat too much, and too much of the
wrong things=97above all, meat. Since it takes on average four pounds of
grain to make a single pound of meat, Roberts writes, =93meatier diets
also geometrically increase overall food demands=94 even in those parts
of Europe and North America where fertility rates are low. Malthus
knew that some people were more =93frugal=94 than others, but he hugely
underestimated the capacity of ordinary human beings to keep eating.
Even now, there is no over-all food shortage when measured by global
subsistence needs. Despite the current food crisis, last year=92s
worldwide grain harvest was colossal, five per cent above the previous
year=92s. We are not yet living on Cormac McCarthy=92s scorched earth. Yet
demand is increasing ever faster. As of 2006, there were eight hundred
million people on the planet who were hungry, but they were
outnumbered by the billion who were overweight. Our current food
predicament resembles a Malthusian scenario=97misery and famine=97but one
largely created by overproduction rather than underproduction. Our
ability to produce vastly too many calories for our basic needs has
skewed the concept of demand, and generated a wildly dysfunctional
market.
Bee Wilson, New Yorker
Surprising article to appear in The New Yorker. Cuba is one example of
a country changing its food system, but there are examples of other
countries like the U.S. and Britain making drastic changes during
wartime. -BA
|
