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. It is no longer enough for individuals to switch to “healthier” choices in the supermarket. Industrial farming means that even those on a vegan diet may reap the nastier effects of intensive meat production. coli was traced to the guts of a wild boar that may have tracked the bug in from a nearby cattle ranch. Roberts opens with a description of E.-coli-infected spinach from California, which killed three people in 2006 and sickened two hundred others.
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There is no such reassurance to be had from the new wave, in which Roberts’s book is joined by “Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System,” by Raj Patel (Melville House $19.95) “Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood,” by Taras Grescoe (Bloomsbury $24.99) and “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” by Michael Pollan, the poet of the group (Penguin Press $21.95).Īll of these authors agree that the entire system of Western food production is in need of radical change, right down to the spinach. “Fast Food Nation” painted an alarming picture-one learned about the additives in a strawberry milkshake, the traces of excrement in hamburger meat-but 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. The first wave was led by Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” (2001), and focussed on the perils of junk food. Roberts’s work is part of a second wave of food-politics books, which has taken the genre to a new level of apocalyptic foreboding. Roberts lacks McCarthy’s Biblical cadences, but his narrative is intended to be no less terrifying. (The modern tomato, he reported, contains far less calcium and Vitamin A than its 1963 counterpart.) These worries seem rather tame compared with Roberts’s his book grapples with the possible termination of food itself, and its replacement by-what? Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road” 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. Pawlick, an investigative journalist from Ontario, was concerned with such predicaments as the end of the tasty tomato and its replacement by “red tennis balls” lacking in both flavor and nutrients. Paul Roberts is the second author in the past couple of years to publish a book entitled “The End of Food”-the first, by Thomas F. Is the world’s population about to be “checked” by its failure to produce enough food? The current crisis could push another hundred million people deeper into poverty. The Haitian Prime Minister was ousted after hunger riots. In Egypt, the Army has started baking bread for the general population. From January to April of this year, the cost of rice on the international market went up a hundred and forty-one per cent. The World Bank recently announced that thirty-three countries are confronting food crises, as the prices of various staples have soared. We were producing more food-more grain, more meat, more fruits and 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 been liberated from a Malthusian “long night of hunger and drudgery.”
As Paul Roberts writes in “The End of Food” (Houghton Mifflin $26), “Until late in the twentieth century, the modern food system was celebrated as a monument to humanity’s greatest triumph. For a long time, it looked as if what Malthus called the “dark tints” of his argument were unduly, even absurdly, pessimistic. In his “Essay on the Principle of Population,” of 1798, the English parson Thomas Malthus insisted that human populations would always be “checked” (a polite word for mass starvation) by the failure of food supplies to keep pace with population growth.
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