The End of Food
Author: Paul Roberts
The best-selling author of The End of Oil turns his attention to food and finds that the system we've entrusted with meeting one of our most basic needs is dramatically failing us.
With his trademark comprehensive global approach, Paul Roberts investigates the startling truth about the modern food system: the way we make food, market and consume it, and even think about it is no longer compatible or safe for the billions of consumers the system was built to serve.
The emergence of large-scale and efficient food production changed forever our relationship with food and ultimately left a vulnerable and paradoxical system in place. Over 1.1 billion people worldwide are "over-nourished," according to the World Health Organization, and are at risk of obesity-related illness, while roughly as many people are starving. Meanwhile the natural systems all food is dependent upon have been irreparably damaged by chemicals and destructive farming techniques; the pressures of low-cost food production court contamination and disease; and big food consumers, such as China and India, are already planning for tightened global food supplies, making it clear that the era of superabundance is behind us.
Vivid descriptions, lucid explanations, and fresh thinking make The End of Food uniquely able to offer a new, accessible way to understand the vulnerable miracle of the modern food economy. Roberts presents clear, stark visions of the future and helps us prepare to make the decisions -- personal and global -- we must make to survive the demise of food production as we know it.
Publishers Weekly
This potentially interesting investigation into the challenges of global food production and distribution is marred by the burial of its argument at the end of the book. Beneath a history of food (old news to any reader of Michael Pollan), factoid avalanches and future-tense fretting, Roberts (The End of Oil) makes a familiar plea for rethinking food systems. When the author illustrates his points with actual players, the narrative becomes affecting and memorable: a French meat packer shows how retail powerhouses dictate prices; a Kenyan farmer demonstrates how "hunger-ending" technologies are often poorly suited to the climates, soils and infrastructures in malnourished regions. Unfortunately, these anecdotes are overshadowed by colorless recitations of Internet research and data culled from interviews. Roberts worries about our "vast and overworked [food] system" and proffers the usual solutions: eat less (land-based) meat, farm more fish, support regional (not just local) agriculture and pressure food policy makers to fund research into more sustainable farming methods (including genetic modification). Despite the undeniable urgency of the issue, Roberts's arguments are as commonplace as his prescriptions. (June 4)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Kirkus Reviews
From Harper's contributor Roberts (The End of Oil, 2004), another dire warning of hard times ahead. This time the author scrutinizes the modern food system, examining its history from prehistoric big-game hunting through the rise of industrialized food production to the retail revolution in which large grocery companies control the supply chain. The result, he asserts, is a low-cost, high-volume model that has reduced the nutritional value of processed food and increased such health problems as obesity and diabetes; it offers superabundance to a few while millions of others go hungry. Roberts argues that the present system is critically vulnerable not only to escalating energy costs and declining supplies of land and water but to the threats of climate change, soil contamination and food-borne diseases. He paints a horrific picture of how all these factors could come together in what he calls " a perfect storm of sequential or even simultaneous food-related calamities" that begins with wheat rust in Uganda and cascades into a global crisis involving droughts, floods, unemployment, mass migrations and a deadly epidemic. To understand how the system operates, the author visited food giant Nestle in Switzerland, a meat-packing plant in France, an agricultural fair in China's Shandong Province and an Albertsons market in Washington state, among other sites, and he consulted with politicians and scientists involved in protecting and expanding the food supply. In his search for solutions, Roberts examines genetically modified foods, organic and integrated polyculture farming, aquaculture and the growing locavore movement ("eat food grown locally"), all of which hold promise but none of whichhas all the answers. The key to change, he declares, lies with an informed and activist public, which is precisely what his book aims to create and energize. A revealing, deeply dismaying overview of how the world's food is produced and marketed. Agent: Heather Schroder/ICM
Book review: Fat Proof Your Family or Herbs and Nutrients for the Mind
Who: The A Method for Hiring
Author: Geoff Smart
In Who, Geoff Smart and Randy Street provide a simple and straightforward solution to every manager's number-one problem: unsuccessful hiring.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Who, Not What
1 Your #1 Problem 3
2 Scorecard: A Blueprint for Success 19
3 Source: Generating a Flow of A Players 47
4 Select: The Four Interviews for Spotting A Players 67
5 Sell: The Top Five Ways to Seal the Deal 123
6 Your Greatest Opportunity 147
For More Information 173
Biographies of Captains of Industry 175
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