Author: Thomas F. Pawlick
Review:
The End of Food: How the Food Industry is Destroying Our Food Supply – and What You Can Do About It” presents a thoroughly researched, at-times funny, at-times angry, disturbing, illuminating and wholly engrossing case study of everything that is wrong with what we eat today. From the unnatural, bottom-line-driven ways in which crops and animals are raised, to the overwhelming number of non-food substances – some, like genetically modified organisms or trans-fatty acids, added deliberately; others, like salmonella, listeria and E. coli, the accidental byproducts of the heedless quest for speed, uniformity and cost-efficiency – in our food, Pawlick persuasively paints a picture of a food system gone short-sightedly and unwholesomely awry.
Pawlick’s foray into the dysfunction of modern food begins simply and humorously, with the innocent purchase of four tomatoes at a local supermarket:
“I wanted to make a salad, a simple thing, just lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, some parsley, add a can of tuna, and toss it in vinegar and oil: a quick meal, so I could get to work on the stuff I’d brought home from the office. But when I went to slice the tomato, it was too hard,” Pawlick writes. All three others prove the same. “Oh well. Put them back on the counter. In a day or two they’d be ripe enough. But a day or two later, they weren’t. A week later, they were still hard. So I put them on the windowsill, directly in the sun, to ripen. Two, three days went by, then a week. Still hard.”
So Pawlick sets off on a mission to find out why those tomatoes resembled red tennis balls more than tasty, juicy salad ingredients. He takes his readers along for each progressively more alarming discovery: that the “variety” of produce available in stores is only a tiny fraction of the different types once grown in North America; that the fruits and vegetables we eat have almost all declined in nutritional value over the past 40-plus years; that the wholesome, “farm-fresh” eggs we buy come from debeaked birds packed 50,000 to 125,000 in a single shed, their eyes and lungs burning from the ammonia rising out of their waste, their bodies diseased and depleted of calcium from the abnormally high number of eggs they’re stimulated, with medications, to lay.
Fortunately, though, Pawlick doesn’t tell only horror stories. He offers a message of hope in the form of, as he calls it, “acts of subversion.” Grow your own food, he urges, buy locally grown and sustainably raised foods, avoid participating in the dysfunctional system offered as the system of choice, make food a sacred, socially bonding thing again, not something to be consumed as quickly and as cheaply as possible.
“Food is not just something you jam into your mouth and swallow fast to prevent starvation. It is the basis of social interaction,” Pawlick writes. “Pressed by the demands of work and daily cares, we may not always be able to give this ritual its due attention. But it should be given much more regard than it is in our present culture. To make the neglect of food a habit, its production a mere conveyor-belt, assembly line routine measured in some corporate ledger book, and the eating of it a peripheral event to be gotten through quickly, is to make it a habit to forget what makes us human.”
Wise words indeed, and a wiser guide to living – and eating – better.
Thomas F. Pawlick, an investigative science journalist, predicts a rather sinister science fiction-like future in his heavily footnoted The End of Food if we don’t act to stop the way large corporations run the agricultural industry. An experienced organic farmer, Pawlick understands how a farm should run. Farmers have an intimate relationship with the farmland, and Pawlick opens our eyes to a bygone farming tradition.
Crop rotation, for example, is a technique used to replenish lost nutrients in the soil while producing multiple crops. Certain crops, such as corn, that use up the nitrogen in the soil should be followed by crops that “fix,” or replace nitrogen, like legumes. Large corporations see this as a waste of time. The remedy then is to plant one crop per farm area. Since the soil will eventually be sapped of any nutrients, inorganic and expensive fertilizers must be used. Discovering what these fertilizers do to the environment is up to the Erin Brokoviches of the world.
Corporations, it turns out, have a lot of say in the genetic makeup of the crops. We tend to think our produce can keep us healthy, but Pawlick points out that even vegetables are being robbed of nutrients. Tomatoes, at one time a great source of vitamin A (good for eyesight) and C (fights diseases), now contain “30.7% less vitamin A and 16.9% less vitamin C” than they did in 1963. Meanwhile, the lipid (fat) content has increased by 65%, and sodium has also increased by 200%! We now know the types of health problems that diets high in fats and sodium can cause.
When corporations decide what is important in, say, the perfect tomato, they see uniformity in size, uniformity in color, high yield, firmness, resistance to disease, and heat tolerance. They don’t consider taste or nutrition. Perhaps in all of the selective breeding for exterior perfection, the inside of the tomato has become nothing more than support for that lovely exterior. “Red tennis balls” is what Pawlick likes to call them.
Yes, Pawlick tells a foreboding story, but he offers us numerous ways to combat the apparent decline in our food supply. The last chapter lists organizations and books on growing your own garden and making use of any space you may have, whether it be an acre or a windowsill. Pawlick also reminds us that politics is still the power of the people. Starting locally can get your voice all the way to Capitol Hill.
Pawlick’s The End of Food stirs feelings of sadness at the current situation, anger towards those who have made the food industry what it is today, and determination to change the way we produce food. Our world could look like a scene from The Handmaid’s Tale, but not if we begin to make change in our own backyards.
Book Title: The End of Food
This is the second "The End of Food" in a series; the first The End of Food, by Thomas Pawlick, was published in 2006. Paul Roberts, a "resource journalist" has also written The End of Oil, published in 2005.
This time, Roberts explains how we've become used to a food industry that efficiently delivers an abundance of calories with less and less nutrition. What's more, we will never achieve mass production of quality food without an unacceptable loss of calories. The tradeoff is much steeper than is commonly known. We tend to be unaware because as a society we care about entertainment as opposed to making informed choices.
In this work, Roberts contributes to what I call "Decilinist Literature". This genre is currently concerned with the un-sustainability of the world economic order with a focus on America and often drawing on information about the fall of empires past, particularly the Roman Empire.
Roberts is one of the edgier voices of Declinism today - he thinks we're in for a radical population decline. The problem, according to Roberts, is that ever-cheaper food provided supply stability for a very long time and that the period of prolonged stability is now ending, ushering in famine and political instability on a grand scale.
If Roberts is correct, the food industry will be unable to maintain supply even if quality can be further sacrificed. About one-fifth of all U.S. energy use goes into the food system, not even counting the fuel required to get food to market. Also, water tables are in decline in many agricultural areas and long-term drought appears to be setting into other regions in the world. The lifting and transporting of water to productive land will require increasing amounts of energy. The food industry has become too dependent on increasingly scarce inputs such as fossil fuels and water and we should expect widespread famines within the next several years.
As we saw in The End of Oil, we almost certainly do not have even a half-decade before total world oil extraction begins to decline, if it hasn't already. Therefore the rise in food prices will accelerate and we should not be surprised by it.
The 70s inflation was associated with peak oil in the U.S. This time it's the world that is peaking in oil production, with enormous implications for worldwide food prices.
The vision is that we will all have to spend a lot of time in long lines to buy cheap foodish-shaped items loaded with corn syrup, trans fat, soy emulsifiers, processed cheese, sugar, added dyes, sodium nitrite (to preserve freshness) and glutaraldehyde (kills insects).
To further the vision, identification cards will be required to authenticate food purchased in stores. Eventually, all the store identification cards will inform a common database and it will be possible to implement food rationing for items experiencing shortages. When this happens, there will be different classes of uniform store identification cards.
A food rationing program will not be designed to ensure equality for all. By definition, inequality will exist when there are shortages. The End of Food series, and Roberts' book in particular, warns of a future that we might still be able to avoid.
A lot of people in the world can't afford even the cheapest food anymore. The End of Food explains how different nations have responded thus far to this unfolding crisis. Policy responses are not encouraging as they haven't changed the way food is produced and transported.
The packaging, transport and marketing of food has increased in intensity while there is no wholesale move toward quality. For example, livestock continues to be kept confined in overcrowded pens far from large single-crop farms (high-yield corn) that feeds them. All these animals generate manure in such quantities as to defy the imagination. Apparently, hogs are particularly prolific, and their waste runs off into large poop lagoons that cannot be properly contained and do not fertilize the cropland. Further, the crowded confinement of animals, living in their own waste, as well as the volume of empty calories fed to them necessitates the use of ever-increasing quantities of antibiotics. This is a downward-quality spiral and a major cause of diabetes and obesity.
Roberts warns of an empty calorie type of starvation, obesity without hope as nutritious food gets too expensive for most people. He warns of the consequences of waiting too long to be able to implement an acceptable solution. If we wait too long, some solution set will be imposed on us involuntarily, and it probably won't be anything that we would have chosen voluntarily.
It has been two years since the last "The End of Food" was published. Let's hope we get another in the series within the same time increment. Food is one of the central topics within Declinist Literature.
Review 2: Roberts essentially shows why the present,agribusiness based ,large farm,industrial factory approach to food production, that relies primarily on oil based fertilizers,herbicides,insecticides,fungicides,and pesticides ,is not sustainable .The world has a major food problem RIGHT NOW.This factory approach to food production is breaking down primarily because the price of a barrel of oil is currently at $139.However,the problem was visible even when oil was priced at $75 a barrel.The current "modern" chemical and oil based approach was designed for a food production system where the price of a barrel of oil was at $15-$20 a barrel.The costs of chemical farming are going through the roof as the price of a barrel of oil continues to skyrocket upward. Other factors are exacerbating the problem.First,it takes about 8 pounds of grain to make 1 pound of red meat from cows.Rising incomes in countries like China and India are leading to a increased preference for more red meat consumption in the diets of people in those countries.This new added demand is starting to raise the price of all of the food chain elements.Second,the biofuels(like ethenol) emphasis is a blunder.Biofuels do not substantially reduce the dependence on imported oil for the USA and merely reduce the supply available for food production for people to eat.Third,the current economic subsidization of agribusiness by the tax payer in America is simply multiplying the problem.Third World farmers are going out of business in large numbers as imported and subsidized American grain undermines their ability to feed their populations locally.Fourth, the current diet based on meat consumption is causing more and more farm land to be converted to ranch ,grazing land,further reducing the supply of grain and increasing the demand for grain to feed the herds.This is also contributing to rising world prices.Fifth,factor in global warming ,droughts in Australia and California,constant civil wars and revolutions in Africa,decreasing amounts of rainfall,overpumping of underground aquifers,desertification,continuing losses in topsoil,and you have a recipe for a potential collapse in the world wide food supply RIGHT NOW.
Some of the solutions are to eat locally(farmer's markets,organic foods),emphasize more fruits and vegetables in the average diet, and substantially cut back on the amount of meat that is consumed .
