Book Review: The Fate of Food by Amanda Little
Release Date: June 4, 2019
When most of us in the wealthier pockets of the world think about the negative consequences of global warming, we often fixate on rising sea levels, massive storms, droughts, and other catastrophic weather events that can destroy homes and wipe out populations. These concerns are completely warranted, but as Amanda Little illustrates in her insightful new book The Fate of Food, our warming and crowding planet will also pose some large problems to the global food supply across all regions and income levels. Food production is forecasted to decline across the next several decades due to drought, changing temperatures, flooding, and less productive land and the world population is projected to 9.8 billion by 2050. In The Fate of Food, Little offers a tour of global food production innovations and highlights the various people, technologies, corporations, and organizations acting to help mitigate these issues and shape the future of what we’ll eat in the decades to come.
The book is structured around major innovation topics, including vertical farming, farming and harvesting robots, and meats produced in petri dishes. Little’s quest takes her across the world including stops in Norway, Silicon Valley, and Kenya and this globetrotting allows her to provide a rather comprehensive overview of the future of food across the world and not just limited to WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) nations, which is especially valuable given the increasing interconnectedness of our global food chain. Little, a journalist who has written about energy and the environment for over 15 years, does an outstanding job of distilling complex scientific concepts such as how cloud seeding works and how seesawing temperatures impact crop biology into digestible prose. The Fate of Food is also more than a science lesson and features some fun facts (including that Winston Churchill apparently foresaw the development of cultured meats in petri dishes in 1931) and profiles of some of the quirky and passionate personalities at the frontlines of food innovation including an aspiring Chinese organic food tycoon and Chris Newman, who overcame a tough upbringing in Southeast Washington DC to become a programmer at the Department o Homeland Security and then quite his job and become a permaculture farmer using traditional techniques of food production.
The title is a bit misleading, as Little showcases efforts to actively change the future of food and a dismal food future is by no means circumscribed. The Fate of Food is not a book-length warning siren and although Little clearly argues that maintaining the status quo will have some severely negative consequences she also offers up reasons for optimism based on the cutting-edge technologies showcased in her writing. Given that discussions of topics such as global warming and food consumption can become incendiary and have passions take priority over the facts and peer-reviewed scientific research, Little’s even-handedness is very refreshing. She is certainly a concerned global citizen who cares about our food future, but she does not have an agenda to push and she’s a realist throughout. It is illustrative that Little recounts dalliances with veganism and other movements that ultimately lost out to concerns over cost and convenience (and the delicious barbecue of her home state of Tennessee). The Fate of Food presents a platform for both sides of the issues on subjects like GMOs and she relies on the opinions of experts and cites respected studies, while also granting exposure to dissenting voices. Rather than wholeheartedly endorse traditional farming methods (which have issues at scaling affordably) or fully putting fate of global food supply in corporations and technocrats, Little advocates for a “third way” solution that forges a middle ground between groups arguing for the return of traditional food production methods and those advocating for completely technology-driven food solutions. Additionally, she recognizes that some of these problems are so complex that they often require the sizable budgets of humongous corporations such as Monsanto and Syngenta to properly research (though Little is by no means an apologist for these corporations and describes how big business certainly needs to shoulder some heavy blame for some of the problems facing the world food supply).
The Fate of Food does a strong job at covering most of the major areas in food innovation but I felt that Little could have spent more time discussing alternative proteins such as insects and the role of major food corporations such as Nestle and Pepsi in adapting to future sourcing and supply chain issues. NGOs and Silicon Valley startups can have a tremendous impact on solving the world’s food issues, but the big industrialized food companies will also have a huge role to play given their outsized role in feeding and hydrating the masses. Little does devote some pages to chemical companies and interviews the CEO of Tyson Foods but she only scratches the surface of a subject that will be crucial in shaping the future of our food. That was really my only (slight) criticism, however, and I found The Fate of Food quite enjoyable overall. Little’s book does a fine job of both educating and entertaining and anyone looking to better understand the issues facing the global food supply and the most promising approaches to solving them should check it out.
8/10