The End of Food: A Book Review

"The End of Food" might sound like a wildly exaggerated title for a book about our modern dysfunctional food system, but Thomas F. Pawlick makes a well-researched and convincing case for such a gloomy assessment.

Pawlick starts "The End of Food: How the Food Industry is Destroying Our Food Supply - And What You Can Do About It" (2006, GreyStone Books) simply, even humorously, with a tale of his battle with four supermarket tomatoes that, while appealingly red and tasty looking, are as hard as tennis balls and just as impossible as tennis balls to ripen.

Launching with the question, "What's wrong with these tomatoes?", Pawlick takes readers deeper into the system that produced them, uncovering a multitude of problems with our attractive, easy-to-transport, long-lasting yet less-than-wholesome food. They include:

A steady decline in the nutrients in commercially grown fruits and vegetables over the past four decades;

An ever-expanding menu of additives that we might or might not know is in our foods, and that might or might not prove harmful;

An agriculture industry that consumes vast quantities of fossil fuels, rich topsoil and water, and produces, in addition to food, chemical-laden runoff, dead soil, waterways uninhabitable by wildlife and a formula for the destruction of family farms;

A meat-producing system of institutionalized cruelty that treats chickens, pigs and cows like so many entries in a ledger book, with the fast, cost-efficient output of milk, eggs and meat being the only factor that matters.

"The corporate, factory-farm food system that dominates so much of North American agriculture today is destructive of nearly everything it touches," Pawlick concludes. "It is unscientific, unnatural, and for ordinary citizens ought to be unacceptable."

Fortunately for readers, Pawlick offers more palatable alternatives. Plant your own gardens using heirloom seeds, he urges. If you live in the city, start a community garden. Spend your food dollars on community-supported agriculture (CSA). Work for change.