Beyond jalapeños

Abstract

If you were kept up at night during the recent scare over Salmonella-tainted jalapeños, you may not want to test your nerves further with journalist Paul Roberts' new book about the global food supply. It makes the Salmonella outbreak – the largest US food-borne epidemic of the past two decades – look like an hors d'oeuvre. In The end of food, Roberts – who previously authored the prescient 2004 book, The end of oil: on the edge of a perilous new world – has turned to another topic in need of his unflinching eye. He details a “perfect storm” of threats to global agriculture, including climate change, population growth, water scarcity, and sharply rising costs of pesticides and fertilizers that depend on those dwindling petroleum supplies. Add in the world's dwindling amount of farmland, and –oh, why not – crashing fish stocks, and…well, you get my point. The book's launch coincided with a new report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation that focused on the ways that climate change is already making food supplies less secure. Scientists have warned for several years that weird new weather patterns, including heat waves, storms, and droughts, won't be good for agriculture. In much of the world, that future is now. Hundreds of millions of Africans and Asians are already familiar with parched land, crop failures, and impossibly expensive food. Haiti's government collapsed last April, after a week of violent street protests over the soaring cost of rice, beans, and other staples. And Mexico's 2007 “tortilla riots” showcased how little slack there is in the system for replacing food crops with biofuels. A fundamental problem is that rising populations and income, particularly in Asia, are outstripping the gains of the “Green Revolution”, when new, petroleum-based fertilizers boosted production. “We have a food system designed for oil at $15 a barrel”, Roberts told me in a phone interview. The last time I checked, the price was eight or nine times that amount. As Roberts points out, the reach and pace of our global food trade are additional culprits in the jalapeño story, and also a mixed blessing when it comes to our diets. While consumers have grown used to year-round, cheap, fresh produce, that well-traveled food means we're also more vulnerable to bacteria and viruses from many new sources. Food crises are such an ancient, perennial problem – think back to the bread riots that contributed to the French Revolution – that most of the world's well-fed masses find them easy to ignore. Yet, even some of the most comfortable among us can be affected. How should we respond to what sometimes looks a lot like a looming Armageddon? A few years ago, Fortune magazine described how the billionaire investor Richard Rainwater, haunted by Internet sites such as LifeAftertheOilCrash. net and DieOff.org, was building greenhouses on a South Carolina farm to assure his own year-round food supply. Around that time, when I, like Rainwater, was first reading up on “peak oil” – the idea that the world has already maxed out on available fuel and is facing imminent shortages – I drove to Willits, a remote town in northern California, to interview some yuppie transplants. One was Jason Bradford, a former research scientist with the Missouri Botanical Garden, who sat with a hen on his lap as he explained what he called the fatal flaw in our food system, namely that we're investing much more energy into it than what we take out. Once the implications of this dawned on him, Bradford convinced his wife Kristin to move to sparsely populated Willits and organize a New Age survivalist group, which back then was meeting frequently to discuss how they would deal with the hordes of hungry urbanites headed their way once the jalapeños hit the fan. Paul Roberts has little patience with this trend. “These people who bail out – give me a break”, he says, predicting that if the food system crashes, “there won't be anywhere to hide”. Instead, he advises his nervous readers to stay “balanced” in their personal lives, while engaging with broader, positive responses. That would include eating more farmed fish and less meat – those beef cows consume about 20 pounds of grain for every pound of meat rendered – while advocating a greater governmental role in ensuring food security, including more money to conduct research on new drought- and pathogen-resistant crops. On the policy front, Roberts also recommends shrinking down the scale of all that traveling food – to a regional as well as a local level. I'm truly in favor of all of these suggestions, and I'm going to do my best to support them – just as soon as I catch up on my sleep.