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A review by socraticgadfly
The Fate of Food: What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World by Amanda Little
2.75
Too techno-optimist, and that's clear with reading the book 4 years after its writing.
The biggie? Lab meat, in even semi-affordable, semi-mass market quantities, is still just as much just around the corner as peaceful nuclear fusion. And, Little doesn't even try to do back of envelope number-crunching on its energy needs.
No. 2? Vertical farming. No, not all it's cracked up to be, and there's been stories about that.
I'm not a techno-pessimist. I AM a techno-realist.
Climate change discussions also didn't go beyond the bare bones. Reality? We know that many wild animals will run out of moving room. Let's look at domestic livestock. What if parts of sub-Saharan Africa get too hot for camel herding as well as cattle herding? Or climate change amplifies, say, wheat rust more quickly than gene technology can beat it down. The different respiration mechanisms plants use at different exterior temperatures and how this could affect food yields wasn't discussed.
There are small errors in the book, both related to and unrelated to the main subject, like the claim that Gihon's original "pipeline" led the unnamed Hezekiah to settle Jerusalem. Instead, it was settled thousands of years before a possibly fictional David captured it.
So, this is "OK," but no more than that.
The biggie? Lab meat, in even semi-affordable, semi-mass market quantities, is still just as much just around the corner as peaceful nuclear fusion. And, Little doesn't even try to do back of envelope number-crunching on its energy needs.
No. 2? Vertical farming. No, not all it's cracked up to be, and there's been stories about that.
I'm not a techno-pessimist. I AM a techno-realist.
Climate change discussions also didn't go beyond the bare bones. Reality? We know that many wild animals will run out of moving room. Let's look at domestic livestock. What if parts of sub-Saharan Africa get too hot for camel herding as well as cattle herding? Or climate change amplifies, say, wheat rust more quickly than gene technology can beat it down. The different respiration mechanisms plants use at different exterior temperatures and how this could affect food yields wasn't discussed.
There are small errors in the book, both related to and unrelated to the main subject, like the claim that Gihon's original "pipeline" led the unnamed Hezekiah to settle Jerusalem. Instead, it was settled thousands of years before a possibly fictional David captured it.
So, this is "OK," but no more than that.