The Fate of Food

What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World

Amanda Little

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781786076465
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Is the future of food looking bleak – or better than ever?

At a time when every day brings news of drought and famine, Amanda Little investigates what it will take to feed a hotter, hungrier, more crowded world.

She explores the past along with the present and discovers startling innovations: remote-control crops, vertical farms, robot weedkillers, lab-grown meat, 3D-printed meals, water networks run by supercomputers, cloud seeding and sensors that monitor the microclimate of individual plants. She meets the creative and controversial minds changing the face of modern food production, and tackles fears over genetic modification with hard facts.

The Fate of Food is a fascinating look at the threats and opportunities that lie ahead as we struggle for food security.

Faced with a perilous future, it gives us reason to hope.

CHAPTER 1

A Taste of Things to Come

Plenty sits still, hunger is a wanderer.

—SOUTH AFRICAN PROVERB

THIS BOOK GREW out of some seeds I planted in my backyard garden in April 2013. The diehards among you may recognize that previous sentence, which echoes a line in the introduction to Michael Pollan’s classic The Botany of Desire, a book that inspired garden lust in me and many other readers. But my seeds and Pollan’s yielded different results. His bourgeoned; mine bombed.

First, they sprouted and, as seeds miraculously do, grew to be fifty and a hundred times their original size. They produced glossy green leaves and the advanced stages of fruit before things took a turn. The garden had been partly my idea, partly my kids’. They’d been raising herbs and cherry tomatoes in planter boxes on their school playground, and wanted to try it on a larger scale at home. It didn’t take much convincing—I’d already read not just Pollan but also Mark Bittman, Dan Barber, Alice Waters, et al. I’d drunk down the all-natural, agave-sweetened, anti-Kool-Aid Kool-Aid. Tending our own backyard plot would slow down the rhythms of life a bit, my husband and I agreed, improve our daily vegetable intake, and offer an iPad antidote while creating a deeper bond with nature. And hadn’t I read somewhere that bonding with nature helped kids focus and improved hypothalamus activity? And family unity! This would be a good, healthy, mind-expanding, family-unifying, money-saving, world-bettering weekend activity.

Nashville, Tennessee, is a far cry from Berkeley, California, but our community teems with acts of world-bettering, especially among parents and especially in relation to food. We have expanding populations of backyard farmers and vegans and Paleolithic dieters and people who raise their own chickens. I have good friends who would rent an ox and a Mesopotamian plough to get closer to the ancient roots of their nourishment if they could, so deep is their food nostalgia. I am nowhere near this serious about my own family’s diet. I love a good farmers’ market, but I mostly shop at my local Kroger and have no qualms about feeding my kids out-of-season fruit or, for that matter, the school lunch. We buy organic when we’re feeling flush, which means we often don’t, and we go through at least half a dozen mass-produced apples a week— the kind of fruit dismissed by critics as overengineered sugar bombs. Still, I’m prone to nostalgia for a time before industrial agribusiness, for the bygone era of heirloom flavors that farmers’ markets and backyard gardeners are trying to protect.

So that spring of 2013, we went all in, sinking hundreds of dollars into a fenced-in ten-by-fourteen-foot raised bed, a small mountain of compost, tomato cages, fish-oil fertilizers, and crates of organic and heirloom seedlings, only to discover that I’m the gardening equivalent of tone-deaf. Two months after planting day, I stood inside my chicken-wire fence, scanning the wilting husks of half a dozen once promising cornstalks, a patch of elephantine cucumbers, one the width of a raccoon, and an aphid infestation in five tomato plants that had merged into a unified organism. The evidence was clear that I’m no better suited to growing my family’s food than I am to repairing a circuit board. An idea that had originally seemed eminently practical—a twenty-first-century victory garden—proved, for our family at least, to be not very practical at all.

It isn’t basic knowledge that I lack, it’s time, vigilance, and good judgment. I have some unique handicaps, admittedly. Pruning edible plants feels to me like a mild form of infanticide—I avoid it, along with slugs, mites, aphids, and stinkbugs, and the application of whatever organic pesticides might deter them. The mosquitoes get so bad in our backyard that they, combined with the seething summer heat of Middle Tennessee, often dissuade me from watering and weeding. And when I do get up the courage to tackle weeds, I often can’t distinguish them from the seedlings and let them grow.

My overgrown garden

Even now, many years after that first failed attempt at edible gardening, we’re still trying to raise vegetables in our backyard plot. The results have improved a bit with help from my husband and kids, who have become more reliable farmhands. But if I’m honest, we haven’t produced much in the way of reliable or abundant dividends. The garden ultimately costs us more than it saves. We keep at it because it makes us feel good. It engages the senses, connects us to the land we live on, and looks nice at a safe distance. The presence of it calms my concerns about, if not a secure food supply, then about the broader impacts of technology on our lives.

And as it turns out, that first garden did manage to be generative— not of food but of questions, such as: How will we fix a failing food system if we can’t necessarily rely on a critical mass of enlightened, vegetarian, non-GMO, organic-only, backyard-harvesting consumers to do so from the ground up? It also got me exploring the history of agriculture and the technologies that have transformed it along the way. I learned that the food-growing efforts of individual producers have been riddled with hardships and impracticalities since, well, the beginning of human civilization.

THE YEAR IS 4000 BC, and we’re not too far from present-day Baghdad. A Mesopotamian farmer is growing wheat on a farm located somewhere between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. He, or maybe she, is hitching an animal to a tool that looks a lot like a hoe but is really a protoplough. At this point, humans are about six thousand years into food cultivation, and there’s no consensus theory (six millennia later, there still isn’t) to explain how and why we made the move as a species from plant-gathering to plant-taming. But if you asked her, this wheat farmer might tell you it’s simple—because her family liked staying put. (Or maybe her kids, like mine, came home one day wanting to plant what they’d seen growing.)

There’s little dispute among archaeologists that farming made it possible for settlements, and ultimately for civilizations, to thrive over time. But there’s also evidence that many settlements predated farming. There were religious sites with temples and permanent dwellings established long before the first cultivated crops appeared. Places such as Pikimachay in western Peru and Gobekli Tepe in eastern Turkey were located, circa 10,000 BC, near fishable rivers or in regions where the food supply was easy pickings. Wild sources of grains, fruits, and protein were abundant and reliable—until they weren’t. A drought or blight may have come along, or the populations outgrew the wild food supply, and the settlers had to find ways to make do with whatever edible plants remained.

We’ll probably never know who pushed the first seeds into the soil and tended those original harvests, or exactly why, but it’s clear that by the time we got to prehistoric Mesopotamia, humans had by and large decided that it’s better to grow than to gather what you need. We stopped wandering the natural world and began to shape it. Migratory lifestyles gave way to settled societies. Ancient economies began to form. Fertility rates shot up, and populations expanded. Larger families were easier to care for when you weren’t constantly on the move, and more offspring meant extra hands in the fields.

In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, historian Yuval Noah Harari writes, “We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin domus, which means ‘house.’ Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the sapiens.”

But as houses were built and populations soared, nutrition declined. Farming radically narrowed the diversity of available foods. Foragers had subsisted on a varied, protein-rich diet, but now farmers were living off whatever limited monocultures of grain they could produce. Bioarchaeologists have found lesions on the skulls of the settlers in early farming societies, indicating severe iron deficiencies, along with evidence of stunting from poor nutrition. The first farming populations were almost invariably shorter than their hunter-gatherer predecessors and more vulnerable to disease. They dealt with longer and more grueling workdays. Farming required land clearing, hoeing, planting, weeding, warding off pests, harvesting, storing, and distributing the food—more calorie-intensive labor than gathering wild bounty.

“Drudgery and hunger provided a motive for developing tools,” says Columbia University professor and ecologist Ruth DeFries. “Every new agricultural tool introduced since the first farming settlements has been designed with the same goal: to coax more food from the earth with less human effort.” This is useful context as we consider how we’ll feed a hotter, more populous world in the coming decades. Humans have now spent the better part of ten thousand years developing a succession of tools to this end, all of them temporary solutions that, generation after generation, get replaced or upgraded to work on larger scales.

We dammed streams first, then rivers. We constructed hand tools from stones and wood and then metals and eventually supplanted those tools with machines. We made fertilizers from human waste and animal manure and then from complex chemicals. Now we have sensors and robots to interpret the needs of our crops; we have food that can be grown without sun or soil; we have Mylar-packaged meal replacements. “Each agricultural technology has been one more link in the lengthy chain of experiments aimed at producing a bigger, more reliable food supply with less work,” says DeFries. Exploring this chain of experiments is a recurring theme of this book. In each chapter, I try to understand not just where we’re going but how we got here, having moved through the long-running technological continuum of food production.

The first Mesopotamian farmer to rig his plough to an ox was an early link in the chain. He’d found a way to tap into the power of animals. Tilling soil took him a fraction of the time and energy it had taken using human power alone. Later generations of Mesopotamians would learn to attach a mechanism to the plough that fed seeds into the soil as it was turned, automating the planting process and increasing yields.

As farmers began to produce crops in volumes well beyond the needs of their communities, they became merchants. Advances in food preservation and storage—sealed containers, drying, fermenting, and curing—meant that food could travel farther afield. The Iron Age brought larger and sturdier ships and trade routes extended across oceans. Emerging empires and dynasties—Spartan, Roman, Zhou— began to specialize in different food exports: grains, nuts, spices, oils, fruit, wine, salted meats, and dried fish.

By AD 700, Muslim traders had established the early foundations of the global economy, distributing crops from northern Africa, China, and India throughout Islamic lands. Imports meant more diverse and nutrient-rich diets and better health. Merchants also traded their ideas and beliefs along with their provisions. The Prophet Muhammad, founder of Islam, was a spice trader when he started preaching, and for more than a thousand years, his Muslim disciples distributed the Koran along their trade routes as they sold their coveted cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and peppercorns.

For all that we don’t know about the human transition from hunting and gathering to “Would you like a Koran with that?” we can safely assume that agriculture was not a fluky discovery or happy accident, but a gradual, often painstaking process that arose from choice or necessity. We can assume that the benefits of farming—a controllable food supply, a lower risk of starvation, and the comforts of staying put— eventually outweighed the costs. Food surpluses meant that economies could diversify. People could choose not to farm and do whatever else needed doing—designing tools, constructing homes, creating art. Students could learn, builders could build, governing bodies could form in societies no longer roaming in search of food. Neolithic farming settlements gave rise to the first written languages, to ceramics and glass production, to irrigation and wheeled transportation systems, and eventually to a mastery of metals and machines.

Over time, robust food systems conferred political power. The Bible bears this out in the Old Testament story of Joseph, who interprets the dreams of his prison guards when he is locked in an Egyptian dungeon. The pharaoh summons him after two haunting dreams—first, that seven sickly cows eat seven healthy cows, and then that seven thin heads of grain swallow seven fat heads. Joseph tells the pharaoh that seven years of famine in Egypt will follow seven years of abundance. The king prepares accordingly, stockpiling grains during the productive years. Sure enough, the subsequent famine is so far-reaching that people come in droves to Egypt from across the world to buy grain. Pharaoh gives Joseph fine robes and the keys to the kingdom.

For thousands of years, civilizations from the Mayans of Mesoamerica to the Vikings of Scandinavia rose as their food supplies flourished and fell as they declined. Even today, the nations with the least reliable food supplies generally have the least diverse economies and the most vulnerable governments. In 2014, for example, the Pentagon warned that drought and crop failures throughout the Middle East— the region that once comprised the Fertile Crescent—empowered ISIS and other extremists to recruit followers among starving and displaced populations. Just before that, in 2011, hunger had helped foment the Arab Spring after droughts had crippled wheat fields in Russia and the United States, causing prices to spike worldwide.

We can only expect these trends to intensify in the coming decades: the countries and communitie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Ddication
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1 A Taste of Things to Come
• CHAPTER 2 Killing Fields
• CHAPTER 3 Seeds of Drought
• CHAPTER 4 RoboCrop
• CHAPTER 5 Sensor Sensibility
• CHAPTER 6 Altitude Adjustment
• CHAPTER 7 Tipping the Scales
• CHAPTER 8 Meat Hooked
• CHAPTER 9 Stop the Rot
• CHAPTER 10 Pipe Dreams
• CHAPTER 11 Desperate Measures
• CHAPTER 12 Antiquity Now
• CHAPTER 13 What Rough Feast
• EPILOGUE Growing Up
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• Copyright Page