Back Forty: Food porn in the face of climate catastrophe

Back Forty will bring you periodic reviews, interviews, and reporter insights about the stories they wrote. We hope you enjoy it as a companion to our content on TheFERN.org and our Ag Insider policy news site. You can subscribe to the newsletter below.

By Christopher Ketcham

The system of industrial agriculture that keeps billions of people fed is degrading the biosphere to the point that it undermines the basis of production. Soil is eroding, freshwater is polluted and dwindling, aquifers are sucked dry. Livestock production destroys ecosystems and transforms grasslands into dead zones from overgrazing. We poison ourselves in the name of progress, via a leapfrogging series of “agricultural revolutions” that have delivered ever-less-nutritious, ever-more-toxic foods. We unleash novel zoonotic diseases with a ceaseless expansion said to be necessary to feed, clothe, shelter, and power an overpopulated world. Smart environmental journalists recognize that we are trapped in a complex ecological crisis of our own making, from which there’s no easy way out.   

Into this morass wades travel and food writer Taras Grescoe with The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past. The book is a misguided and ultimately trivializing attempt at redressing the slow-burn environmental catastrophe of fossil-fueled agriculture. What we get is a lot of flavor rendered in graceful but also sometimes grating travelogue, with endless delight at things like “a rectangle of untoasted white bread … topped with half a pound of pork” or a “squeeze of Rod’s vinegar-based sauce banish[ing] any thought of blandness.” Think Anthony Bourdain with a literature degree. The author is aware enough of his tendencies to apologize, twice, for repeated “lapse[s] into vintage Gourmet magazine-era food porn.”

Grescoe starts with what seems an intriguing premise: We need to reconnect with the food diversity of our hunter-gatherer and Neolithic ancestors’ diets. His research into what he calls the “adventurous eating” of early Homo sapiens leads to astonishing revelations. At a single 23,000-year-old site in Africa’s Rift Valley, for example, paleolithic foragers were discovered to have eaten at least 16 families of birds and 140 different kinds of fruits, nuts, seeds, and legumes. It was a diet drawn from an equally diverse range of landscapes: wetland, savannah, woodland, desert. In Denmark, archaeologists unearthed from a bog a well-preserved Iron Age man who had in his stomach 60 different plant species that he had consumed just in the day or two before he died.

Today, by contrast, of the 10,000 plants that Homo sapiens has variously consumed over millennia, just 150 are cultivated for food. A mere 14 species provide as much as 90 percent of the calories we get from livestock. As Grescoe writes, “We need to look to the past, to the huge variety of foods we’ve eaten in the course of our species’ existence, a diversity that we are now at risk of losing.” 

He claims to show how we can eat our way out of the impasse of the unsustainable industrial food system via boutique culinary choices. The genetic riches “of forgotten and near-lost foods offer real hope for future food security,” he asserts. It’s an idea that’s endearing for its elegant simplicity, but the evidence Grescoe marshals is unconvincing and his case quickly falters.   

The first of his global forays takes us to Mexico, where we are told that a viable path of future human nutrition is the eating of various insects. But it’s actually not viable, as a local celebrity chef in Mexico City suggests. “If we bring [insect consumption] up to an industrial level,” restaurateur José Carlos Redon tells Grescoe, “we begin to destroy ecosystems.” Grescoe doesn’t address large-scale insect farming, but he does briefly nod to the global insect collapse due to pesticides and other industrial toxins as he departs Mexico with a suitcase “full of chicatanas, ahuatle, chapulines, and other tasty creepy-crawlers.”

From Mexico we head to the wild maritime forest of coastal Georgia. The siting of the narrative is by now irrelevant, as the point of the book is clear: It’s a glorified rare-food hunt pretending to be something more significant. Drawn from his self-described comfy home in Montreal to Turkey, England, Spain, France, Switzerland, the southern U.S., and the backcountry of British Columbia, the author’s goal is to bring us along on treks into the foodie unknown. There’s barely a word about how the carbon spewed in his travels contribute to the drought, heat waves, glacial melt, flooding, and so on that are laying waste to the food system he’s writing about.  

Much of this questing leads nowhere. His sojourn across the American South looking for a prized piece of barbecued Ossabaw pig is followed, a few pages later, by him telling us we shouldn’t be eating meat, especially swine. So much for the future of that food. Yet he devotes an entire 30 pages, a tenth of the book, to hunting out the perfect barbecue. 

One is left with the impression that The Lost Supper is part junket, part publicity tour for chosen entrepreneurs in the boutique food business who come off as largely uninteresting and sometimes contemptibly arrogant. In one of the low points of these encounters, the wealthy owners of a spice boutique in Montreal tell us that they “always wanted the best that the world has to offer” and “were fortunate to grow up in the one percent.”  

The future of food as envisioned here is the satisfaction of elite gullets. This becomes clear, in subtly hideous fashion, when he visits a cheese farmer in England who tells him that we should be eating a lot less cheese — but the cheese we do eat has to be “sustainably produced,” and “that’s going to be a whole lot more expensive.”

Strip away the travel journalism, food elitism, and gastronomic preciousness, and we end up with maybe 40 pages in The Lost Supper whose message matters. Today, record production of wheat and other grains staves off the negative feedback of starvation that historically kept our species’ numbers in check. Grescoe suggests that Norman Borlaug’s vaunted “green revolution” — Agricultural Revolution 3.0, initiated in the 1960s — has set up Homo sapiens for an epic population crash. Borlaug, the son of an Iowa farming family, studied agronomy and became a genius of plant genetics after he figured out a solution to the rust blights that threatened world wheat production.  

Borlaug’s innovative rust-resistant wheat strain, dominant today in grain production, was totally out of keeping with evolutionary history. It required technological and environmental inputs on a massive scale: more water, more fertilizer, more machine agriculture.

How many people were allowed to be born and fed due to Borlaug’s rust-resistant wheat? Grescoe calculates that roughly 4.5 billion people — about half of humanity alive today — “wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for [a] fossil-fuel-driven glut of cheap, ever-less nutritious food.”

And so we cut to the quick of the matter. “There may soon be 10 billion of us on the planet,” observes Grescoe, “and that is a problem.” According to the World Wildlife Fund, humanity “must now produce more food in the next four decades than we have in the last 8,000 years of agriculture combined.” This while soil erosion reduces crop yields by 0.3 percent annually, and the rising frequency of extreme weather events cuts yields even further. We want to believe new technological solutions are on the way to save us, new iterations of wheat and other staples happening in the labs of the technocrat geniuses. But that’s not happening. As Grescoe warns: “There is no Agricultural Revolution 4.0 visible on the horizon.”