"Paul Roberts is the second author in the past couple of years to
publish a book entitled “The End of Food”—the first, by Thomas F.
Pawlick, appeared in 2006. Pawlick, an investigative journalist from
Ontario, was concerned with such predicaments as the end of the tasty
tomato and its replacement by “red tennis balls” lacking in both
flavor and nutrients. (The modern tomato, he reported, contains far
less calcium and Vitamin A than its 1963 counterpart.) These worries
seem rather tame compared with Roberts’s; his book grapples with the
possible termination of food itself, and its replacement by—what?
Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road” contains a vision of a future in
which just about the only food left is canned, from happier times;
when the cans run out, the humans eat one another. Roberts lacks
McCarthy’s Biblical cadences, but his narrative is intended to be no
less terrifying.

Roberts’s work is part of a second wave of food-politics books, which
has taken the genre to a new level of apocalyptic foreboding. The
first wave was led by Eric Schlosser’s “Fast Food Nation” (2001), and
focussed on the perils of junk food. “Fast Food Nation” painted an
alarming picture—one learned about the additives in a strawberry
milkshake, the traces of excrement in hamburger meat—but it also left
some readers with a feeling of mild complacency, as they closed the
book and turned to a wholesome supper of spinach and ricotta
tortellini. There is no such reassurance to be had from the new wave,
in which Roberts’s book is joined by “Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden
Battle for the World Food System,” by Raj Patel (Melville House;
$19.95); “Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing
Seafood,” by Taras Grescoe (Bloomsbury; $24.99); and “In Defense of
Food: An Eater’s Manifesto,” by Michael Pollan, the poet of the group
(Penguin Press; $21.95)."

The rest can be found he

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critic...atlarge_wilson

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modom
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