The Rural Voice, 2005-03, Page 51Book Review
Diverse views on the state of agriculture and food
wart vauuanrrraw
FEEDING
THE FUTURE
FROM FAT TO FAMINE
vna.■r.vi. xo
MON MOM
Feeding the
Future
Edited by
Andrew
Heintzman and
Evan Solomon
Published by
Anansi
$37.95 hard
cover
Reviewed by Keith Roulston
No matter which side of the debate
over current food and agriculture
practices you're on, you'll find
something to like in Feeding the
Future: From Fat to Famine, How to
Solve the World's Food Crises.
You'll also find something to make
your blood boil.
That's because, unlike books like
Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation,
this book doesn't have a point of
view. As they did last year with
Fueling the Future, Andrew
Heintzman and Evan Solomon of The
Ingenuity Project have assembled
essays on agriculture and food from
eminent thinkers from Canada and
around the world.
And so in chapter one, Saving
Agriculture From Itself, you read
Stuart Laidlaw's criticism of today's
agriculture as allowing nitrogen and
pesticide runoff into streams and the
decline of the local economy because
of large corporate hog farms on the
prairies but three chapters later in The
High -Tech Menu William I. Atkinson
argues that technology, including
genetic modifications, is the answer
to food safety and food shortages. In
the very next chapter Diet for A
Smaller Planet: The Real Sources of
Abundance, Frances and Anna Lappe
argue that more -productive GM seeds
are not the solution to Third World
food shortages but more democracy
in the ownership of land and resour-
ces is. They argue that if anything,
high-cost genetically modified seeds
make the problem worse.
And so back and forth the
arguments go. As the editors sum up
in the Afterward (which features a
visit to Ted Zettel's organic dairy
farm at Elmwood) the only way to
solve the dilemmas of the food sector
is "to eat with greater interest,
curiosity, and intelligence" and
they're obviously trying to create that
curiosity.
And so traditional farmers can re-
examine the so-called "efficiency" of
modern agriculture when they learn
that in 1940 the average American
farm produced 2.3 calories of food
energy for every calorie of fossil fuel
energy it used while today three
calories of fossil fuel are used for
every calorie of food produced.
Cattle, for instance, are truly efficient
energy machines taking the grass
produced by sunlight and converting
it into protein that's an energy source
for humans, yet the way the market
wants us to produce beef today, with
cattle kept in feedlots and the feed
taken to them, finished with large
amounts of corn that requires more
energy inputs than it gives, it takes 35
calories of fossil fuel energy to create
one calorie of beef. (Pork's ratio is
even worse, 68 to one.)
Not that we in the developed
world are short on calories. In
Overfeeding the Future, Kelly
Brownell points out researchers
estimate obesity -related health care
costs the U.S. alone $75 billion
annually, half of it through
government -supported medical
programs.
Unhealthy foods, she points out,
are highly accessible, convenient, are
promoted heavily, good tasting and
cheap while healthy foods are less
accessible (not in every vending
machine or fast food restaurant), less
convenient, less expensive, less tasty
(not as much fat and sugar) and
barely promoted. In its peak year, she
says, the U.S. government gave its
primary nutrition education program
$3 million for promotion while the
food industry spends 1,000 times that
just to advertise its products to
children. The result is that for the first
time in history, experts in North
America are questioning if today's
obese children will live shorter lives
than their parents.
Canadian farmers struggling to
keep going in the face of low crop
prices and the BSE crisis, will find it
hard to accept the premise of some of
the authors who blame the problems of
third world farmers on high subsidies
in Europe and North America. Sylvia
Ostry, in Between Feast and Famine:
Fixing Global Trade reviews the
long, difficult history of trade reform
in agricultural products and updates
information on the Doha round of
WTO talks. Like some of the other
authors she seems to accept the idea
that farmers here will be better off
without subsidies and that third world
farmers will be better if there's more
access to North American markets.
There seems little recognition that
trade liberalization has seen Canadian
farmers export more and get less for
it than ever before and that the only
branches of agriculture that are
profitable are those protected from
imports in milk and poultry.
Still, if you'd like to take your eye
off the bottom line on your financial
statement and look at the big food
picture Feeding the Future provides
lots of food for thought. You might
not agree with everything. but these
writers are helping influence the
public view of agriculture that will
shape your future as a farmer.0
Check out our
great selection of
books from the
Rural Reading Room
at the back of the
book
MARCH 2005 47