The End of Food: The Coming Crisis in the World Food Industry by Paul Roberts

He was right — our oil economy is crazy. Here, in The End of Food, he tells us that the modern world is in trouble because of our relationship with food. And he's right again — our food economy is crazy, too. Both books are worth reading but this is the scarier of the two.

In some ways, this book reminds me of the other great food exposés — Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, say, or The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. Certainly, Roberts tells us quite a lot about today's food and its wider consequences — among other things, there's a passage about a lake of pig manure in North Carolina that burst its banks and unleashed "twenty-five million gallons of excrement". But what he's really saying is that the economics of food — not just fast food, but food in general — are junk economics.

It's all about scale. Food retailers, he says, have grown so big that they compete with each other by cutting prices, which has the effect of making them even bigger — the more they grow, the smaller profit margins they need, so the more they can lower their prices. The result is that they pass on this economic model, of cutting costs and raising yields, to food producers. Basically, everything's getting bigger and cheaper, and the system is like a runaway train. In the evolution of the food market, organisations that are big and cheap are fitter, so they are the ones that tend to survive.

One of the consequences of all this cheap food, of course, is that we're getting fatter. As Roberts explains, we were, as a species, designed to put on weight — that's because, for most of our life on earth, there was hardly any food around. We were made to crave sugar and fat. And now the food industry is addicted to churning it out; it's a disastrous situation. You can do what you like — slap high taxes on junk food, say, or encourage people to eat salads. But how effective will this be? "Such initiatives seem destined to fail because they miss the underlying problem," says Roberts.

The problem is overproduction.

But surely it can't go on for ever. For instance, look at the way we grow crops such as wheat and soybeans.

There's no time to rotate crops, to give the soil a chance to replenish itself with nutrients. So we just pump nitrogen-based fertiliser into the soil, which is effective at first but has diminishing returns. But since we're hooked into an economy of overproduction, all we can do is pump more fertiliser in. It's crazy. But we're caught in a spiral. Reading this book, I kept thinking: we're doomed.

So: the people who sell us food are having a price war. Farmers all over the world are cutting costs. Topsoil is failing. Livestock is crammed into sheds, and often fed on inappropriate food. Huge lagoons of manure are sitting there, waiting to burst their banks. Fertiliser is leaching into rivers, poisoning fish. Crowded fish farms emanate fecal matter, poisoning the surrounding seawater.

Meanwhile, fresh water is getting more and more scarce, on account of all the grain, much of which we're cultivating to feed the livestock we need to satisfy our growing appetite for burgers, which make us fat.

Something, of course, has got to give. The food economy is poised on the edge of a cliff. What Roberts is telling us, essentially, is that our food is not cheap; it just seems to be cheap. One day, we'll find out how expensive it really is. Or rather, was..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

With an insightful global approach, Paul Roberts investigates the startling truth about the way we make, market, consume, and even think about food, and how this system is no longer compatible or safe for the billions of consumers that it 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 cause contamination and disease, and big food consumers such as China and India are already planning for tightened global food supplies - the era of superabundance seems to be behind us. Vivid descriptions, lucid explanations, and fresh thinking make "The End of Food" uniquely able to offer a new and accessible way to understand the vulnerable miracle of the modern food economy. Roberts presents clear, stark visions of the future and helps us identify the decisions both personal and global that we must make to survive the demise of food production as we know it.