The UMNH Book Club will meet to discuss The End of Food by Paul Roberts on Monday, July 13, 2009, at 6:30 p.m. This book was recommended to us by Slow Food Utah, who will be contributing to the Book Club discussion next week.I'm just getting started on Roberts' book, but immediately realized that the title is more daunting and discouraging than the text. The book is a very interesting read!
As I personally have been exploring our industrialized food supply (starting with Omnivore's Dilemma in this Book Club two years ago), I have continually asked myself, "How did we get here? How did we just hand over our food system to the interests of chemical fertilizers and bottom-line profits?"
The first chapter of this book, "Starving for Progress", lays out "how we got here" over the past three million years, starting with Australopithecus, "a diminutive ancestor who lived in the prehistoric African forest and ate mainly what could be found there -- fruits, leaves, larvae and bugs." Over the next 20 pages or so, the author recaps how the quest for food and survival drove the development of modern humans, civilization and, ultimately, a global society and food supply. The chapter illustrates the intricate relationship between humans being, the ever-changing environments and climates in which they live, and the desire to create predictability in their resources. It is like a speed-read through several anthropology and political science courses in one sitting!
But the reading challenges my organic leanings as being symptomatic of luxury. The fact is, predictability in food and other natural resources is a good thing. It creates opportunity for individuals and civilizations to do more things that hunt for and produce food. Was there a moment in time when this desire for predictability and "enough" went to far? Was it in the mid-twentieth century when we added chemical fertilizers and carbon-based machinery in an attempt to be masters over nature, thereby changing the very thing we call food? Or was in 3500 B.C., when Egyptian wheat farmers were "routinely producing more grain than they could eat themselves, and these surpluses" let to trade and the first accumulate wealth? Agriculture itself is a mastery over nature. Yet, did human society cross a line in 1957, when, according to Roberts, "Ray Goldberg, the Harvard economist, and his colleague, John Davis, proposed that term "agriculture" be replaced with a new, more fitting one: "agribusiness."
Food is the fundamental way in which we as humans -- as living beings -- interact with the natural world. Food, or energy from which to live, creates the "place of humans" within the natural world, referring to the Museum's mission statement. So far, this book and others I've read provide data to the balance between calories produced by the earth and calories needed -- and how that balance changes over time. The questions are popping in my mind. Join the Museum and Slow Food Utah for a discussion of this book, and will raise your own questions and comments here or at the discussion on 7/13/09!
For more information on the meeting, visit us at www.umnh.utah.edu/bookclub.
Onto Chapter 2: "It's So Easy Now"....
