Book Review: The End of Food (Paul Roberts)

Written by journalist and Harper's contributor Paul  Roberts, the book is a spriritual succesor to his prophetic and well-received 2004 book, “The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World,”. In this book, the author provide a detailed analysis about our food production with its weaknesses, vulnerabilites and issues. Roberts ingeniuosly begins the book by giving us a short but comprehensive chronological history tour of humanity's food sector, from hunting and gathering to our most recent food revolution of the 20th centuries. He identifies many flaws and vulnerabilities of our current food production system such as sustainebility of the system, its safety and its future. 

One of the issues that Roberts raise is that our food production system has become too cost reduction and profit orientated, thus causing approximately one billion humans obese while another one billion souls go to bed with empty stomach. As developing countries such as China and India growing rapidly economically and consumers expectaction rising globally, local food industries are collapsing-being usurped by global food production model that emphasizes mass production at low cost, and also encourage meat consumption. This result in our food production model has become more and more inefficient. It took a whopping 20 pounds of grains to gain a pound of beef, 7.3 pounds for 1 pounds of pork and 4.5 pounds for a pounds of chicken  meat.

Roberts also stressed that our current food production method is too wasteful and thus become not viable for our environment to support it. For example, intensive grain farming industries in US have cause the the North America to lose valuable amount of topsoil. Furthermore the high dependence of oil and synthetic  materials in the food sector has cause negative environment effects such as increasing amount of greenhouse gases and pollutions of land and water.

Well, for me this book is worth reading as it will written in a factual and informative manner. For a non fiction book, it is easy to understand  because it is presented in a way made most of us in touch with the major food issues nowadays. Afterall food is the most important aspect of our lives - more than sex I must said. Hence this book will definitely change your perception about food. For me, it make me to eat more responsibly.