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Title

• The End of Food

Author

• Paul Roberts

Publisher

• Houghton Mifflin Company

The End of Food

Overview

From the publisher

In this carefully researched, vividly recounted narrative, Roberts lays out the stark economic realities beneath modern food — and shows how our system for 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, hyper-efficient industrialized food production, though it generates more food more cheaply than at any time in history, has reached a point of dangerously diminishing returns.

Overproduction is so routine that nearly one billion people are now overweight or obese worldwide. And yet, those extra calories are still so unevenly distributed that the same number of people — one billion, roughly one in every seven of us — can’t get enough to eat.

Meanwhile, the shift to heavily mechanized, chemically intensive farming has so compromised the soils, water systems, and other natural infrastructure upon which all food production depends that it’s unclear how long such output can be maintained.

Comprehensive and global, with lucid writing, dramatic detail, and fresh insights, The End of Food offers readers a new, accessible way to understand the vulnerable miracle of the modern food economy.