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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Paul Roberts is the author of The End of Oil, 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, and Rolling Stone, and lectures frequently on business and environmental issues. He lives in Washington State.
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Roberts identifies a fundamental contradiction plaguing America's food supply. On one hand, food constitutes the original economic store of value. It is a commodity subject to laws of supply and demand. On the other hand, food gives and sustains life, and it follows the conventions of biology, not capitalism. Today's food supply lies in danger from each of these alternatives. Vast worldwide production-and-distribution mechanisms efficiently move vital nourishment around the globe, but they less-benignly present pathways for pathogens to spread disease far from their sources. Roberts warns that this present system has succeeded on the triple foundation of cheap energy, limitless fresh water, and unchanging climate, all of which now stand in some jeopardy. And the system's very success has led to unintended health risks, such as obesity. Roberts does not limit his study to Western countries, and he shows the effect of current policies on China and on uniquely vulnerable Africa.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
PAUL ROBERTS'S prophetic and well-received 2004 book, "The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World," anticipated the current energy crisis. Now he's moved on to what we put in our mouths. Roberts's new book, "The End of Food," which takes into account a vertiginous pile of recent developments - including the so-called tortilla riots of 2007, during which thousands took to the Mexico City streets to protest the rapidly rising cost of maize - may prove no less prescient. A contributor to Harper's and other magazines, Roberts sketches a dire present and ponders a bleak future. Readers with a sci-fi bent might, upon completing this book, decide that the 1973 film "Soylent Green" should no longer be viewed as merely a schlocky doomsday vehicle for Charlton Heston, but as an almost plausible peek at the year 2022, when global warming and overpopulation have rendered the earth inhospitable to most plants and animals, and steak and strawberries are black market goods consumed only by the super-rich. We have reached the end of the "golden age" of food, Roberts writes. No longer do the things we eat "grow only more plentiful, more secure, more nutritious and simply better with each passing year." Instead, E. coli outbreaks "have almost become an annual autumn ritual," and a new day is arriving when "cost and convenience are dominant, the social meal is obsolete" and the act of eating has "devolved into an exercise in irritation, confusion and guilt." Roberts's worst-case scenario isn't tomatoes devoid of taste. It's a "perfect storm of sequential or even simultaneous food-related calamities." Climate change and spiraling population growth have him wondering not just "whether we'll be able to feed 9.5 billion people by 2070, but how long we can continue to meet the demands of the 6.5 billion alive today." Roberts delivers a litany of terrors small and large: "Arable land is growing scarcer. Inputs like pesticides and synthetic nitrogen fertilizers are increasingly expensive. Soil degradation and erosion from hyperintensive farming are costing millions of acres of farmland a year. Water supplies are being rapidly depleted in parts of the world, even as the rising price of petroleum - the lifeblood of industrial agriculture - is calling into question the entire agribusiness model." Agribusiness and the industrial food it engenders have, of course, already attracted serious critics. Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation" exposed the ills of a lowestcommon-denominator diet of burgers and fries. Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma" traced among other things the perils of high-fructose corn syrup and grain-fed cattle. Both were works of literary journalism, well-reported and well-written metapolemics that asked tough questions of both producers and consumers. But they didn't finish the job. What eaters (and readers) still need, Roberts argues, "is a way to consider such critical questions and concerns in a larger, more global context." Roberts aims to go Schlosser and Pollan one better. "The End of Food" wants to be what marketing wonks call a category killer, a book that, through its wide-angled scope, trumps all other takes on the subject. Flood-damaged corn in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He gets about halfway there. Roberts is an expert at marshaling facts and collating figures, but a workmanlike writer. He travels to, among other food crisis flashpoints, Kenya and China. No matter the locale, Roberts measures inputs and outputs. And he draws conclusions from the differences. Our modern "food system can only truly be understood as an economic system," he argues, "one that, like all economic systems, has winners and losers, suffers periodic and occasionally profound instability and is plagued by the same inherent and irreducible gap between what we demand and what is actually supplied." Roberts isolates a number of culprits. Wal-Mart, for example, where America spends 21 cents of every food dollar and where some experts say we will soon be spending 50 cents of that dollar, continues to drive down retail prices to unsustainably low levels. One consequence is that food is becoming, once again, a commodity of "lesser quality and nutritional value." And there's the food industry itself, which has long funneled research dollars into scarf-and-bolt goods of the high-flavor and high-fat sort. Roberts cites a report projecting that the true measure of success will soon be whether foodstuffs "can be consumed one-handed, and whether packaging causes a mess." Then there's the issue of where, exactly, we get our protein. "The Hummerlike inefficiency of the beef cow," Roberts writes, "never really mattered when corn and other feed grains were cheap." That was then. Now, as China and other nations grow more prosperous and adopt Western-style diets, beef cows - which must eat 20 pounds of grain to gain one pound of flesh - are becoming ecological pariahs, gobbling up corn and driving up prices for all goods that require corn, which, a perusal of Pollan will remind you, is in nearly every modern product, from fuel for our bodies to fuel for our cars. Consumers are largely left out of the dialogue here. In Roberts's book, they are statistical simulacra. To understand the motivations of urban eaters, who view dining "as a hobby and as a vehicle for socializing and fun," he cites (groan) a PowerPoint presentation from the 2006 meeting of the American Meat Science Association. Late in the narrative, Roberts reveals himself to be not a wild-eyed locavore, intent upon growing his own food and transforming the world economy in the process, but a moderate. In an epilogue, he suggests that we eat less meat and more farmed fish; support regional, instead of merely local, food systems; and work within the system to gain support for sustainable farming methods, while engaging the scientific community in open and honest debate about the possibilities of genetically modified crops. After hundreds of pages of alarmsounding and rabble-rousing, moderation seems like a curious position for a man who declares that our food production and distribution system is "so focused on cost reduction and rising volume that it makes a billion of us fat, lets another billion go hungry, and all but invites food-borne pathogens to become global epidemics." 'The Hummerlike inefficiency of the beef cow,' Roberts says, 'never really mattered when ... feed grains were cheap.' John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, is general editor of "Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food Writing."
Choice Review
Roberts, a journalist who writes on economics and politics, applies the same approach he used in The End of Oil (CH, Sep'04, 42-0428) to the food system. Given its critical importance and fossil fuel dependency, the food system is a logical topic to address in this timely sequel. Roberts puts forth a strong and attention-worthy neo-Malthusian argument, offering some unsurprising but promising potential steps toward a more sustainable food system. He intends to "extend the current and often familiar narratives about food into a broader exploration of the food economy as a whole." The bulk of the book, its first two sections, explains in depth the origins and impacts of the current food system, familiar to anyone who has read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006) or the like. It is only in the last third of the book that the author's argument is explained and solutions proposed. Clearly and intelligently written and with extensive endnotes, this book is a welcome update to Lester Brown's Who Will Feed China? (1995). A reader would be well served to use Warren Belasco's Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food (CH, May'07, 44-5011) for context. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels. J. M. Deutsch CUNY Kingsborough Community College
Guardian Review
By the third century BC, the hungry young city of Rome needed more grain than the surrounding countryside could provide, and relied on imports from Sicily and Sardinia. As the city grew, more productive land was needed. The options were trade and conquest. The subjugation of Carthage and then Egypt secured access to the (then) fertile plains of north Africa, which were colonised not just by soldiers and officials but with 6,000 farmers to grow grain for the capital. Rome's port, Ostia, was too small to accommodate the great Alexandrian grain ships, so their cargoes were transferred to smaller vessels at Puteoli in the Bay of Naples. Even when the grain reached Ostia (where it was joined by wine and oil from Tunisia, pork from Gaul, honey from Greece, and Spanish liquamen , the fishy sauce indispensable to Roman cooks), it had to be loaded on to barges and pulled 20 miles up the Tiber, a job that took teams of men and oxen three days. The infrastructure this gave rise to - the far-flung fields and herds, the roads and wharves (Ostia's huge, hexagonal dock and 350-metre quays can still be seen), the farmers and sailors, ham-curers and vintners, merchants and shopkeepers, decision-makers and administrators, working in many countries and languages - prefigured the international trade and logistics system that feeds our cities today. As Carolyn Steel's book Hungry City illustrates, cities have always relied on the countryside to feed them, and until relatively recently this intimate link was an accepted and visible feature of city life. Steel is an architect who finds evidence in maps and street plans of food's shaping role in urban development. Cities grew up near productive countryside that could supply perishable foods, and main thoroughfares mark the routes by which food came in from the country to central markets. City streets were filled with the reassuring sight, smells and sounds of the citizens' food supply - cattle and sheep being herded through the streets to be milked or slaughtered, carts carrying milk and fresh produce into the city, and fertiliser, in the form of dung and night soil, back out. British street names still testify to these activities: Cowcross, Cornhill, Haymarket. Gradually, though, feeding cities became less of a struggle. Railways, refrigeration and motorways made it easy to transport large quantities of even perishable foods over long distances (the purity of "railway milk" astonished Londoners when it first appeared). Animals and abattoirs were banished from town centres, and foods were funnelled through warehouses at rail or road junctions, rather than through city markets. Town houses lost their pigsties, vegetable patches and eventually, in some cases, their dining rooms; suburbs sprawled over what had once been market gardens; and cities sprang up in such inhospitable places as the Dubai desert. To an extent that would have been unthinkable to our pre-industrial forebears, the inhabitants of modern cities can take their food for granted. For most of us in the developed world, this has brought a welcome liberation from hunger, anxiety and labour. Amid the plethora of books and articles describing what is wrong with the contemporary food system, it is easy to overlook its great achievement: a dependable supply of safe, cheap food, in unprecedented variety and abundance. This is exactly what food planners have been aiming for since the Sumerians established the first city at Uruk in Mesopotamia. As we are all learning, however, the efficiencies of modern food supply come at a cost. For Steel, the gap between "the feeders and the fed" has now become too wide. In 2006, for the first time, more than half of the world's population lived in cities. The strain of feeding this growing urban population is in danger of destroying the resources it depends on: "Unless we find a new urban model, we are soon going to run out of planet." This is also the theme of The End of Food , though the two authors approach the subject in very different ways. Paul Roberts's aim in examining the global food economy is to show how seemingly disparate problems - obesity, the prevalence of food-borne disease, the persistence of hunger, the transformation of Third World wilderness into export-oriented farms - are interdependent. No single aspect of the system is at fault, but rather the way the system as a whole has come to operate. Roberts writes lucidly and dispassionately about human needs, natural resources and the economics and politics that bind them (his last book was called The End of Oil ). He argues that although food shaped many of our economic systems (among them specialisation and management, accounting, trade and speculation), food itself has proved unsuited to the high-volume, low-cost industrial model that we now impose on it. We have had to standardise, de-nature and re-engineer our plants and livestock to fit the technologies we use to harvest, process, package, preserve and transport them. The externalities of this system are now so enormous - from greenhouse gases to the iniquities of cheap labour - that they threaten the population the system is supposed to serve. Roberts and Steel work hard not to sound too pessimistic. They find (a few, far-flung) examples of how things are being done differently. Roberts reviews the potential of organic farming and GM technology to feed the world's burgeoning population. Steel postulates a place - Sitopia, from the ancient Greek word for food, sitos - where food would be sustainably produced, as far as possible locally sourced, fairly traded, equitably distributed, and thoughtfully bought, eaten and disposed of. What is needed, they agree, is what Roberts describes as a "fundamental re-imagining" of our relationship with food. The trouble is that the global food system is now so vast, complex and entrenched that there are no entities, public or private, that can bring about change on the scale needed. Both authors conclude that it is therefore down to the individuals who grow, buy, cook and eat food to take control. The transformation of the food system has been driven, writes Roberts, by "one of the most powerful and brutally efficient of all human forces - the market. But that system is still a work in progress, a product of billions of human decisions." How we make those decisions, he implies, can change the system again, for the better. The unanswered question, for those of us still enjoying the abundance and convenience that the exploitative and polluting modern food system brings us, is how much comfort and indulgence we are prepared to give up. Rosalind Sharpe researches food and sustainability at the Centre for Food Policy, City University, London. To order Hungry City for pounds 11.99 or The End of Food for pounds 11.99, both with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-food.1 By the third century BC, the hungry young city of Rome needed more grain than the surrounding countryside could provide, and relied on imports from Sicily and Sardinia. As the city grew, more productive land was needed. The options were trade and conquest. The subjugation of Carthage and then Egypt secured access to the (then) fertile plains of north Africa, which were colonised not just by soldiers and officials but with 6,000 farmers to grow grain for the capital. Rome's port, Ostia, was too small to accommodate the great Alexandrian grain ships, so their cargoes were transferred to smaller vessels at Puteoli in the Bay of Naples. Even when the grain reached Ostia (where it was joined by wine and oil from Tunisia, pork from Gaul, honey from Greece, and Spanish liquamen , the fishy sauce indispensable to Roman cooks), it had to be loaded on to barges and pulled 20 miles up the Tiber, a job that took teams of men and oxen three days. The infrastructure this gave rise to - the far-flung fields and herds, the roads and wharves (Ostia's huge, hexagonal dock and 350-metre quays can still be seen), the farmers and sailors, ham-curers and vintners, merchants and shopkeepers, decision-makers and administrators, working in many countries and languages - prefigured the international trade and logistics system that feeds our cities today. For most of us in the developed world, this has brought a welcome liberation from hunger, anxiety and labour. Amid the plethora of books and articles describing what is wrong with the contemporary food system, it is easy to overlook its great achievement: a dependable supply of safe, cheap food, in unprecedented variety and abundance. This is exactly what food planners have been aiming for since the Sumerians established the first city at Uruk in Mesopotamia. As we are all learning, however, the efficiencies of modern food supply come at a cost. For [Carolyn Steel], the gap between "the feeders and the fed" has now become too wide. In 2006, for the first time, more than half of the world's population lived in cities. The strain of feeding this growing urban population is in danger of destroying the resources it depends on: "Unless we find a new urban model, we are soon going to run out of planet." - Rosalind Sharpe.
Kirkus Review
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 Nestl 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 which has 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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The author of The End of Oil considers how we make, market, and consume food, which leaves too many people fat and too many others starving. With a nine-city tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 Starving for Progress In the late 1940s, anglers who fished the waters of the Hudson River near Orangetown, New York, noticed something odd about the trout they were reeling in: every year, the fish were getting larger. Fishermen rarely complain about big fish, but because the creatures in question were being hooked downstream from Lederle Laboratories, a pharmaceutical company, some may have wondered whether the phenomenon was entirely natural. Eventually, the fish stories reached the upper management at Lederle, where they piqued the curiosity of Thomas Jukes, a brilliant biophysicist and expert in the new field of vitamin nutrition, who decided to investigate. Jukes knew that Lederle discharged its factory wastes in great piles near the river. He also knew that one such waste product was a residual mash left over from the fermentation process that Lederle used to make its hot new antibiotic tetracycline. Jukes surmised that the mash was leaching into the river and being eaten by the fish, and that something in the mash--Jukes dubbed it a "new growth factor"--was making them larger. Initially, Jukes suspected the factor might be vitamin B12, a newly identified nutrient that was known to boost growth in laboratory animals. The vitamin was a byproduct of fermentation, so it was very likely to be in the mash. But when Jukes and a colleague, Robert Stokstad, tested the mash, they found something quite unexpected, and even world-changing: although B12 was indeed present, the new growth factor wasn't that vitamin but the tetracycline itself. When mixed with cornmeal and fed to baby chickens, even tiny doses of the amber-colored antibiotic boosted growth rates by an unprecedented 25 percent. Jukes wasn't sure why this was happening. He speculated (correctly, as it turned out) that the tetracycline was treating the intestinal infections that are routine in closely confined farm animals, and that calories that normally would have been consumed by the chicks' immune system were going instead to make bigger muscles and bones. In any case, the phenomenon wasn't limited to baby chickens. Other researchers soon confirmed that low, subtherapeutic doses of tetracycline increased growth in turkeys, calves, and pigs by as much as 50 percent, and later studies showed that antibiotics made cows give more milk and caused pigs to have more litters, more piglets per litter, and piglets with larger birth weights. When the discovery was announced to the world in 1950, Jukes's new growth factor was the closest thing anyone had ever seen to free meat and a welcome development amid rising concerns over food supplies in war-torn Europe and burgeoning Asia. As the New York Times put it, tetracycline's "hitherto unsuspected nutritional powers" would have "enormous long-range significance for the survival of the human race in a world of dwindling resources and expanding populations." Jukes's discovery would indeed have enormous long-range significance, although not quite in the ways the Times envisioned. By the middle of the twentieth century, the global food system was in the throes of a massive transformation. In even the poorest of nations, thousand-year-old methods of farming and processing were being replaced by a new industrial model of production that could generate far more calories than had been possible even a generation earlier--and which seemed poised to end the cycle of boom and bust that had plagued humanity for eons. But the great revolution was incomplete. For all our great success in industrializing grains and other plants, the more complex biology of our cattle, hogs, chickens, and other livestock defied the mandates of mass production. By the early twentieth century, meat--the food that humans were built for and certainly the food we crave--was still so scarce that populations in Asia, Europe, and even parts of the United States suffered physical and mental stunting, and by the end of World War II, experts were predicting global famine. Then, abruptly, the story changed. In the aftermath of the war, a string of discoveries by researchers like Thomas Jukes in the new fields of nutrition, microbiology, and genetics rendered it possible to make meat almost as effortlessly as we produced corn or canned goods. We learned to breed animals for greater size and more rapid maturation. We moved our animals from pastures and barnyards and into far more efficient sheds and feed yards. And we boosted their growth with vitamins and amino acids, hormones and antibiotics (it would be years before anyone thought to ask what else these additives might do). This livestock revolution, as it came to be known, unleashed a surge in meat production so powerful that it transformed the entire food sector and, for a brief time, allowed many of us to return to the period of dietary history that had largely defined us as a species-- and where the story of the modern food economy properly begins. By most accounts, that narrative started about three million years ago, 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. Australopithecus surely ate some meat (probably scavenged from carcasses, as he was too small to do much hunting), but most of his calories came from plants, and this herbivorous strategy was reflected in every element of Australopithecus's being. His brain and sensory organs were likely optimized to home in on the colors and shapes of edible (and poisonous) plants. His large teeth, powerful jaws, and oversize gut were all adapted to coarse, fibrous plant matter, which is hard to chew and even harder to digest. Even his small size--he stood barely four feet tall and weighed forty pounds--was ideal for harvesting fruit among the branches. So perfectly did Australopithecus match his herbaceous diet that our story might well have ended there. Instead, between 3 million and 2.4 million years ago, Australopithecus got a shove: the climate began to cool and dry out, and the primeval jungle fragmented into a mosaic of forest and grasslands, which forced our ancestors out of the trees and into a radically new food strategy. In this more open environment, early humans would have found far less in the way of fruits and vegetables but far more in the way of animals, some of which ate our ancestors, and some of which our ancestors began to eat. This still wasn't really hunting, but scavenging carcasses left by other predators--yet now with an important difference: our ancestors were using stone tools to crack open the leg bones or skulls, which other predators typically left intact, to get at the calorie-rich, highly nutritious marrow and brains. Gradually, their feeding strategies improved. By around 500,000 years ago, the larger, more upright Homo erectus was using crude weapons to hunt rodents, reptiles, even small deer. Erectus was still an omnivore and ate wild fruit, tubers, eggs, bugs, and anything else he could find. But animal food--muscle, fat, and the soft tissues like brains and organs--now made up as much as 65 percent of his total calories, almost the dietary mirror image of Australopithecus. On one level, this shift away from plants and toward animal food was simple adaptation. All creatures choose feeding strategies that yield the most calories for the least effort (anthropologists call this optimal foraging behavior), and with fewer plant calories available, our ancestors naturally turned to animal foods as the simplest way to replace those calories. But what is significant is this: even if the move toward meat began out of necessity, the consequences went far beyond replacing lost calories. In the economics of digestion, animal foods give a far greater caloric return on investment than plants do. It might take more calories to chase down a frisky antelope on the veldt than to pluck fruit in the forest. But for that extra investment, Homo erectus earned more calories--far more. Fat and muscle are more calorie dense than plants are and thus offer more energy per mouthful. Animal foods are also easier to digest, so their calories can be extracted faster. In all, meat provided more calories, and thus more energy, that could then be used for hunting, fighting, territorial defense, and certainly mating. Meat was also a more reliable food source; by shifting to meat, prehistoric man could migrate from Africa to Europe, where colder winters and lack of year-round edible vegetation would have made an herbivorous diet impossible. But meat's real significance to human evolution was probably not the quantity of calories it contained but the quality of these new calories. Because animal and human tissues have the same sixteen amino acids (whereas most plant-based proteins contain just eight), animal converts readily into human: meat is the ideal building block for meat. That's why bodybuilders eat a lot of meat; it also helps explain why, as our ancestors ate more animal foods, their bodies grew larger. Whereas Australopithecus stood four feet tall, Homo erectus was a strapping six feet in height, and much stronger, which made him better at eluding predators and hunting. (The point isn't that meat made us big but that by eating more meat, our ancestors could then adapt more readily to an environment where greater size and strength were advantageous. But once attained, our new stature had to be maintained, which is one reason our ancestors sought out larger prey animals; not only did these big beasts supply a lot of calories, they also supplied more fat per pound than did smaller animals.) As important, Homo erectus's skull was a third larger than that of Australopithecus, and the brain inside vastly more developed--an adaptation known as encephalization that was also related to the meatier diet. Just as muscle grows best on a diet of meat, brains thrive on the fatty acids, and especially on two long-chain fatty acids, the omega-3 fat docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and the omega-6 fat arachidonic acid (AA), which are abundant in animal fats and soft tissues. Plants have omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, too, but these are shorter forms and can't provide the same nutritional benefits. Fatty acids were just the start... Excerpted from The End of Food by Paul Roberts All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Prologue | p. ix |
| I | |
| 1 Starving for Progress | p. 3 |
| 2 It's So Easy Now | p. 29 |
| 3 Buy One, Get One Free | p. 57 |
| 4 Tipping the Scales | p. 82 |
| II | |
| 5 Eating for Strength | p. 113 |
| 6 The End of Hunger | p. 144 |
| 7 We Are What We Eat | p. 175 |
| 8 In The Long Run | p. 205 |
| III | |
| 9 Magic Pills | p. 239 |
| 10 Food Fight | p. 269 |
| Epilogue: Nouvelle Cuisine | p. 298 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 323 |
| Notes | p. 324 |
| Bibliography | p. 363 |
| Index | p. 366 |
