Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Average Customer Rating:

Once again, Roberts Delivers (and it's not hyperbole)

Customer Rating:

The End of Food follows on Paul Roberts' End of Oil. Ok, so this guy seems to be finding a lot of ends of things, so isn't this just an exaggeration? Sadly, no. With the same comprehensive, reportorial style as his fantastic The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World, Roberts delivers a compelling and chilling view of where things are headed in the world of the food all of us eat every day. Nuances, details, linkages and causalities are all explored dispassionately and fairly. You might think of this book as just another apocalyptic view of the world. There are plenty of dark views to be had on the bookshelf, to be sure. But End of Food is as complete, solid and factual as End of Oil. I read End of Oil when it came out in 2005. Many of its observations, predictions, and revelations, were dismissed by many as overblown and sensational. Some were difficult to understand and accept. But three and a half years later, his observations are widely accepted. End of Food has the same quality -- one can hardly complete this book without having a deep and important understanding of one of the most basic elements of the human race. This is a must-read book for anyone who would like to peek into the future -- and take some actions now that will benefit not just the environment, but your health and well being. Roberts has done it again.

The End of Food

Customer Rating:

This is a most thoght-provoking book. I was introduced to it through an interview with the author on NPR and was intrigued because he had written The End of Oil a few years ago and was pretty much spot on about what has transpired. Food - its production, consumption, history, etc. - is so well-covered in this book that I can never, ever think about food in the same light, or not think about it for that matter.

Not Malthus, Any More Than Climatologist Hansen is Chicken Little

Customer Rating:

I agree this is among the very best of this century's "Declinist Literature". Although the author covers a lot of problematic ground, from avian flu to bioengineering to obesity, what sticks with me the most is his urgent Cassandra alarm about the looming danger of worldwide famine. Those who poo poo Roberts as "Malthusian" should read more carefully the section with Malthus, who was writing his doomsday predictions at a time when the whole New World still lay there rich in topsoil, ripe for takeover by millions of starving European farmers. Sure, Malthus was proven wrong - at that time - but he would've been correct if the New World hadn't been quickly deforested/deprairied and farmed to feed teeming Europe. There is no frontier left, (the Amazon is the last big frontier left on Earth to be cleared and farmed, and we all know about that grim scenario),everywhere soils are massively depleted and threatened by flood, pests and drought from climate change, while our addiction to natural gas derived fertilizer is a recipe for major famines when the pipelines are cut off by war or peak oil. There is little water left in China, India and many other regions, which - as Roberts shows - import water indirectly in the form of grain from those that still have water. But anway, how is it "Malthusian" to point out rationally that fecund soil has peaked all over the Earth? Recommended to go with it is Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture Perhaps Roberts was hastily edited or not edited(for example, "eighteen hundred years ago" instead of "eighteen thousand years" in the section on Cro Magnon diet. Yet readers should realize that many major publishers no longer use copy editors and sometimes agents without training in editing are now asked to do the job without pay, so get used to errors and typos).

Decent book, badly edited

Customer Rating:

Robert's "End of Food" includes a lot of good information, but there are probably 200 places where a good editor would've challenged the author to reword or tighten up the manuscript. I wonder whether his editor even read the book carefully, or whether he/she knew enough about the subject to properly edit it. A few examples of the issues I'm talking about: At the beginning of the book Roberts lays out a ridiculously simplified, linear reductionist theory of the role meat consumption played in man's history (except that he rolls it out as fact rather than no small amount of speculation). There are a number of factual inaccuracies that should've been caught or at least reworded. Example: He states that meat is easier to digest than plant foods, which in many cases is simply wrong. Cooked rice, for example, is half-digested before it's even in the stomach. Three times Roberts refers to soil as dirt. In 45 years I've never heard a farmer (or any agricultural specialist) refer to soil (in a field)as "dirt". This carelessness on Robert's part is enough to make thoughtful readers question whether he's been shoddy in other areas too. There are at least a dozen places where he refers to animal manure as poop, which is just plain silly, and makes Roberts sound like a goofball. Imagine if physicians referred to a laceration as a "Bo-Bo" in a medical report, not once, but 12 times? Could you take him seriously? Roberts is very very loose with his date references. Sometimes he's wrong. On p. 118 he states "By the late 1960s the U.S. was in deep economic trouble......having lost it manufacturing lead to low-cost rivals like Japan...." But in fact in the late 60s very little U.S. manufacturing had shifted to Japan. Roberts is only about 15 years off there. Then, on page 152 he writes, "...by the late 1980s....African output faltered;...The timing couldn't have been worse. Just as Africans were producing fewer bushels [in the late 80s], a new glut of grain , unleashed by Butz's "fence row to fence row" policy, sent prices plummeting". The problem with this is that Butz's fence row policy was implemented in 1971, almost 20 years before the African output faltered, which is many years too much lapsed time to have had a meaningful direct effect. Finally, what possible reason is there for a 26 page prologue in a general interest book such as this? 26 pages! Where was Robert's editor? If a writer's proposing a 26 page prologue, there's at least a chapter missing in the body of the book. All in all I enjoyed the book, although it's not nearly as well-written as Pollan's food books.

Difficult to plod all the way through

Customer Rating:

I had read Roberts' earlier "the end of oil" and had forgotten how difficult it was to read through. This book is slightly less interesting despite the more interesting topic, which in theory should be more malthusian than the end of oil, but Roberts treats every issue with a very vacillating, politician-like ambiguity. It's surprising for example that he doesn't make more out of the peaking of fossil fuels in relation to fertilizer for food production. Every time he comes near to making a point he hedges and describes the optimistic and pessimistic viewpoints without really taking a stand. Typical of his writing style as well is his tendency to travel all over the globe interviewing random peasants, farmers, executives, etc., as if a travelogue somehow makes the subject more accessible. Presumably this is because he is a journalist, not an expert per se in the issue of agriculture or food. But after so many round the world trips interviewing a farmer in china for ex. and his woes the reader begins to get tired of his peripatetic descriptions. In summary I found it hard to really get a grip on any of the issues he presents except in a very vague way and I found it equally hard to get all the way through to the end without giving up. And this is not because I don't find the issue serious-- if anything, I think he is far too optimistic: the lack of freshwater supplies, peaking of fossil fuels, lack of arable land, increasing loss of topsoil, increasing population pressures, will probably result in some kind of malthusian crisis.