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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 363.8
EAN: 9780618606238
Edition: 1
ISBN: 0618606238
Label: Houghton Mifflin
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 416
Publication Date: June 04, 2008
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Studio: Houghton Mifflin

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• The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
Paul Roberts, the best-selling author of The End of Oil, turns his attention to the modern food economy and finds that the system entrusted to meet our most basic need is failing.
In this carefully researched, vivid narrative, Roberts lays out the stark economic realities behind modern food and shows how our system of making, marketing, and moving what we eat is growing less and less compatible with the billions of consumers that system was built to serve.
At the heart of The End of Food is a grim paradox: the rise of large-scale food production, though it generates more food more cheaply than at any time in history, has reached a point of dangerously diminishing returns. Our high-volume factory systems are creating new risks for food-borne illness, from E. coli to avian flu. Our high-yield crops and livestock generate grain, vegetables, and meat of declining nutritional quality. While nearly one billion people worldwide are overweight or obese, the same number of people—one in every seven of us—can't get enough to eat. In some of the hardest-hit regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, the lack of a single nutrient, vitamin A, has left more than five million children permanently blind.
Meanwhile, the shift to heavily mechanized, chemically intensive farming has so compromised soil and water that it's unclear how long such output can be maintained. And just as we've begun to understand the limits of our abundance, the burgeoning economies of Asia, with their rising middle classes, are adopting Western-style, meat-heavy diets, putting new demands on global food supplies.
Comprehensive in scope and full of fresh insights, The End of Food presents a lucid, stark vision of the future. It is a call for us to make crucial decisions to help us survive the demise of food production as we know it.

Paul Roberts is the author of The End of Oil, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award in 2005. He has written about resource economics and politics for numerous publications, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Harper's Magazine, and Rolling Stone, and lectures frequently on business and environmental issues.




Rating: - Hungry Eye
This is one of those very alarming books in which an investigator brings together information on many different problems that most knowledgeable observers probably understand to a certain degree, but have no idea of the sheer systemic enormity of the problem. Here Paul Roberts, author of the outstanding (and even more frightening) "The End of Oil," applies a similar resource economics analysis to the international food business. And the news is not good. Food production has become structured around ... Read More

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Rating: - Heavy Reading
This book is an investigation of the modern industrial food economy. Roberts came to the topic with a long-standing interest in economics, which is reflected throughout the book. The book is divided into three sections, covering the history of industrial food production, the problems that such a food system brings about, and possible alternatives or improvements for future food production. Roberts considers a wide range of topics, from rising populations in need of more food to environmental degradation ... Read More

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Rating: - Required reading if you care about food
Just to echo other reviews. Food has been too easy over the last few decades. Be prepared for the problems in the near future.

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Rating: - Once again, Roberts Delivers (and it's not hyperbole)
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.
... Read More

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Rating: - The End of Food
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.

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