For those readers about to participate in tonight’s Yom Kippur fast, Green Prophet Daniella Cheslow offers up many reasons why we need to think again about food production in this weeks ‘eco-reads’ review:

Paul Roberts may be the only food writer capable of swinging from prehistoric man gathering berries to a doomsday scenario ten years from now when avian flu slaughters humans by the millions. In The End of Food (390 pp) Roberts takes the long route through the history of food domestication and industrialization to see how humans built a modern system that has created a billion obese people even as another billion are starving.

If Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma was about how he felt upon looking at towering corn silos and polyculture farms, Paul Roberts’s The End of Food is about how different elements of American and global food production are all enmeshed in one massive system lurching toward disaster. He writes about Africa’s enduring food crises:

“For decades, the operating assumption of the aid community was that no matter how dysfunctional a country’s food system might be, it would eventually respond to the right combination of policies and technologies and join the global food system. Such an outcome may still be possible for a country like Kenya. But we also now understand that food insecurity comes not simply from bad government, fickle aid strategies, and postcolonialism, but also from the pressures of a burgeoning population coming up against natural constraints such as poor soils, scarce water, and a changing climate.”

Roberts is an expert weaver of economic numbers with journalistic storytelling. He goes where few food writers have gone before, such as Chinese agricultural expos and Japanese rice paddies fertilized by duck manure. He also details the Cuban agriculture devolution, which occurred in the late 1980s as the Soviet Union stopped exporting cheap oil and oil-based fertilizers to the Caribbean island, leaving it to retool the food economy for local production.