How to feed the world The history and future of food

In this granular study, Smil (Size), a geography professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba, delves into the details of global food production. Exploring the difficulty of supplying humans with adequate nutrition, Smil notes that an adult male trying to survive solely on fruits and vegetables would have to eat, for instance, 40 pounds of lettuce or 10 pounds of apples per day. Animal products provide more efficient means of consuming necessary fats and proteins, but Smil contends they come with high costs, including the diversion of vast amounts of water for growing livestock feed and the release of 8.7 billion tons of methane into the atmosphere annually. Weighing in on proposals to make food production more sustainable and efficient, Smil suggests that the technological challenges and high costs of producing lab-grown meat mean it's unlikely to replace livestock anytime soon, and that forgoing synthetic fertilizers and pesticides would lower crop yields by 20% and leave 40% of humanity without enough to eat. Instead, Smil recommends focusing on reducing food waste through flexible pricing and innovations in packaging design, as well as improving sustainability by decreasing meat consumption. Smil makes a convincing case for "doing more with less," though his "unapologetic" surfeit of statistics and jargon ("trophic levels"; "feed conversion ratios") can make for dry reading. Though persuasive, this is a bit of a slog. Photos. (Mar.)

Food for thought. To begin a book about food with the word "Catastrophism" and a quotation from Thomas Robert Malthus' 1798Essay on the Principle of Population--as this book does--is to invite pessimism. Malthus famously wrote that "the power of population is infinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man." Now in the wake of global climate change and soaring world population, Malthus' words seem more prescient than ever. "Inevitably," Smil writes, "rising temperatures and increasing CO2 concentrations will have substantial plant-specific and regional differences," possibly cutting corn and rice yields in Asia and Latin America. The author of dozens of books and a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba, Smil aims to be fair. Indeed, he insists that he's "agnostic about long-term prospects of the global food supply." But when push comes to shove, he chooses optimism and insists that "it is rational to argue that, barring mass-scale conflict and unprecedented social breakdown, the world will be able to feed its growing population beyond the middle of the 21st century." Malthus would disagree. So would recent authors who have written books that sound alarms about food insecurity and famine. Pessimists point to deforestation, the erosion of democratic institutions, and war. Smil, though, offers a quantitative approach. "Many books about agriculture and food do not contain many numbers, but this book is teeming with them," he writes. "Numbers are the antidote to wishful thinking and are the only way to get a solid grasp of the modalities and limits of modern crop cultivation, food, and nutrition. With this foundation it is far less likely you will make incorrect interpretations or misunderstand the basic realities of food." A sensible vision of the future that calls for "incremental changes." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.