The Last Bite: is the world’s food system collapsing? (New Yorker)

[jpak]

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/05/19/080519crat_atlarge_wilson

In his “Essay on the Principle of Population, of 1798, the English parson Thomas Malthu insisted that human populations would alway be “checked” (a polite word for mas starvation) by the failure of food supplies t keep pace with population growth. For a lon time, it looked as if what Malthus called the “dark tints” of his argument were unduly, even absurdly, pessimistic. As Pau Roberts writes in “The End of Food” (Houghton Mifflin; $26), “Until late in th twentieth century, the modern food system was celebrated as a monument t humanity’s greatest triumph. We were producing more food—more grain, mor meat, more fruits and vegetables—than ever before, more cheaply than eve before, and with a degree of variety, safety, quality and convenience tha preceding generations would have found bewildering.” The world seemed to hav been liberated from a Malthusian “long night of hunger and drudgery.

Now the “dark tints” 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’s population about to be “checked” by its failure to produce enough food?

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. 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 “red tennis balls” lacking in both flavor and nutrients. (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. Roberts lacks McCarthy’s Biblical cadences, but his narrative is intended to be no less terrifying.

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. The first wave was led by Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” (2001), and focussed on the perils of junk food. “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. 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).

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[judasdisney]

1. Don't panic. We can eat our flag pins.