Food...

To put it lightly: the food system is out of whack. So much so that we're conjuring up Thomas Malthus, a British economist not known for optimism. At the turn of the 19th Century, he predicted that a growing human population would be kept in check by food supplies, and predicted experiences like a “long night of hunger and drudgery.” For decades, even centuries, we thought we’d escaped Malthus’s ideas, with a seemingly endless increase in food, grain, meat, and convenience products (soup that fits in a car cupholder comes to mind) and it was all cheap too! (Take that Malthus.) But, as Bee Wilson writes in The New Yorker (“The Last Bite,” May 19, 2008), that "hunger and drudgery" that Malthus predicted is now upon us. That includes:

1.      Thirty-three countries in food crisis,

2.      Rapid increase in the cost of food staples (rice, corn),

3.      100 million people on the brink of poverty because of food prices, and

4.      Hunger riots (Haiti), ration cards (Pakistan), and armies baking bread for the general population (Egypt), to name a few.

Recently, Paul Roberts published The End of Food, part of a “second wave of food-politics books,” writes Wilson. The first wave, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, wasn’t as apocalyptic as the current tidal surge that includes In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, Bottom Feeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood by Taras Grescoe, and Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System by Raj Patel.

The one thing that all these food writers agree on: the Western food system must change and, I think, better to change now than be forced to change in a few years. Roberts predicts that in the next four decades demand for food will exceed supply, and we're not dealing with a basic supply and demand graph—demand is increasing when our population is staying the same. So it’s not how many people we’re feeding (as Malthus predicted would be the cause of our demise) but what we’re eating. The richer we are, the more we eat (see rising rates of obesity), and the more we eat of the wrong thing, mainly inefficient meat products (it takes four pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat).

Bottom line: we’ve created a food market that’s out of whack from what you learn in economics 101. As Wilson writes, “Our current food predicament resembles a Malthusian scenario—misery and famine—but one largely created by overproduction rather than underproduction. Our ability to produce way too many calories for our basic needs has skewed the concept of demand and generated a wildly dysfunctional market.”

Wilson continues on to break down this market of bottomless stomachs and the enemy of cheap food with typical New Yorker thoroughness (read the full article HERE) and I can warn you that it’s not pretty, but what’s the solution?

Well, Wilson doesn't provide many. There's Pollan’s solution: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” something most of us could do to get behind. Or, as a country, we could stop using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides by using crop rotations and mixed-livestock farming, and split our huge industrial farms into smaller cooperatives. The only downside is that the best example of this (it’s already been done) is Cuba, so its unlikely that many countries will follow their lead.

Fine, so Wilson doesn’t give easy fixes, but he does provide a lot to think about, especially next time you’re in the grocery store and deciding what to cook for dinner (farmed salmon vs. industrially grown beef vs. a nice big salad with fresh veggies). Because, it seems, we're speeding into a food apocalypse, where everyone is susceptible, there are few "healthy" options left (thank you industrial farming), and every food choice we make has huge ramifications. Thank goodness its farmer's market season.   

Book cover from Amazon.com