In an age of super-sized meals and obesity epidemics, food-shortage doomsday scenarios always seem a little surreal. Backed by half a century of agricultural abundance, it’s easy to imagine that cheap food will permanently abound. But in a new book, “Empires of Food,” academic Evan Fraser and journalist Andrew Rimas show us that we are not the first advanced civilization to have a hubristic, misplaced confidence that we’ll always be fed.
A number of factors, including crop specialization, dependence on good weather, complexity and dependence on fossil fuels are making us vulnerable to a global food collapse. So not to skip over the significance of food…we need it to live. We will die without food.
We have come to expect an increasing abundance of food at our fingertips 24/7. This has proven to be an accurate depiction over the past 50 years as we found new ways to leverage agricultural productivity. However, instead of building surplus stocks of food, today we have built a bigger world that is dependent on highly productive agriculture.
Structurally, our system looks a lot like the European system in 1300, just before the crises of the 14th century. In medieval Europe, monasteries were the centers of food production. As the population increased, the monks tried to increase the amount of grain produced by cutting down forests and expanding into the hills. This was a short-term solution because cutting down trees only loosens the topsoil. The medieval warm period ended around 1300 A.D. In 1315, Europe was faced with a bunch of bad late-summer storms. The wind and the rain caused the topsoil to wash away, and crops failed. There were widespread famines, and Europe lost some 20 percent of its population. Years of bad harvests and poor productivity followed, which in turn led to political upheavals, riots, anti-Semitism and hunger. They were also probably very weak. So when a new disease called the Black Death appeared in 1347, it wiped out another 30 percent of the population.
Source: Salon
