Planning After Our "Empire of Food"

Recently, a Briton armed with a metal detector uncovered a trove of
more than 50,000 Roman coins, which archeologists believe was an
ancient farming community's offering to the gods to ensure a bountiful
harvest. Our own agricultural practices have moved past any pleas to the gods
to incorporate instead an industrial-scale arsenal of petrochemical
fertilizers, pesticides and genetic modification.

Yet, as Evan Fraser and Andrew Rimas persuasively argue in their highly entertaining and thought-provoking new book "Empires of Food: Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations," the results will be the
same: an inevitable collapse of the systems of food production and the
society dependent upon them.

The literature re-evaluating our relationship with food has grown so
substantial in recent years as to almost constitute its own sub-genre. Such authors as Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food), Karl Weber (Food Inc.), and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation)
have all added to a burgeoning collection of titles exploring not only
our destructive farming and eating habits, but the newly rediscovered
practices of urban agriculture.

That many urban dwellers are clamouring to raise their own chickens is just one indication of the reach this literature is having.

In fact, Empires is the authors' second foray into the
field. Fraser, an academic geographer who divides his time between the
Universities of Guelph and Leeds, previously collaborated with
Boston-based journalist and editor Rimas on 2008's Beef: The Untold Story of How Milk, Meat and Muscle Shaped the World.

Like this previous book, Empires is an engagingly written history
with an urgent message about the fragile unsustainability of our
agriculture.

According to the authors, it is only through the massive use of
artificial fertilizers, manufactured with finite supplies of natural
gas, that we have managed to increase our numbers past six billion
people.

Peaking fossil fuel supplies, combined with our abuse and
destruction of topsoil, climate change and the depletion of aquifers
mean that, sooner than we think, the global larder will be empty --
with all that implies for our ability to maintain current population
levels.

Fortunately, this truly sobering message is presented with such
clever writing, good humour and compelling storytelling that it
prevents the book from descending into grim polemic.

The reader is taken on an informative journey through the systems of
production, storage, trade and transportation -- those elements
necessary for a food empire.

Each factor is given an historical treatment showing how
agricultural innovations that may have at first brought bounty eventually delivered decreasing returns and unintended
consequences.

The Mesopotamians of the Fertile Crescent constructed irrigation
systems that ended up salting their soils; the Romans aggressively
overworked their soils to feed a huge urban population and shore up
their contracting military empire; and European kingdoms and
monasteries deforested the countryside and depleted their soils before
a changing climate, famine and the Black Death carried off almost 45
per cent of the population.

Fraser and Rimas demonstrate that any food empire is dependent on
the combination of good soil, abundant water, a co-operative climate
and a complex (and often inequitable) mesh of socio-political
arrangements.

When such conditions exist, civilizations flourish, populations
increase, and the associated complexity of that society also expands.

Yet the pendulum always swings back. The very complexity of food empires eventually heralds their collapse.

In the end, the ill-considered and abused interrelationships between
nature and society swiftly unravel, as do the civilizations themselves.

The authors enliven this otherwise depressing argument with the
recurring picaresque narrative of Francesco Carletti, a hapless
17th-century entrepreneur who set off on a 15-year global voyage to
gather and market the foodstuffs of the Caribbean, South America and
Asia.

Through Carletti's eyes, we are introduced to all the foods we now
blithely take for granted, including chocolate, tea, potatoes and
tomatoes. More significantly, the reader is shown how in subsequent
centuries these and other comestibles were transformed into industrial
commodities dependent upon ecologically devastating farming practices,
genocide and exploitative labour conditions.

Between Carletti's tale and other key historical examples, Fraser
and Rimas examine the globalized arrangements that fill our
supermarkets with an affordable, appealing and seemingly endless supply
of groceries and reveal them for what they are and always have been --
a destructive, cruel and doomed illusion.

The alternative, they propose, is a mix of diverse, small-scale
farms serving local customers that are nested in a global trading
system. Although the authors admit such things are much easier to
suggest than realize, Empires of Food is a valuable contribution to a much-needed dialogue on working towards such a transformation.

Empires of Food: Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

By Evan D.G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas

Free Press, 302 pages, $35