Consumed: food for a finite planet

Sarah Elton walks fields and farms on three continents, not only investigating the very real threats to our food, but also telling the little-known stories of the people who are working against time to create a new and hopeful future.

By 2050, the world population is expected to reach nine billion, and the challenge of feeding this population, along with climate changes, will increasingly wreak havoc on the way we produce our food. At the same time, we have lost touch with the soil; few of us know how to grow it, and we are at the mercy of multinational corporations who control the crops and giving little thought to the damage their methods are inflicting on the planet. The author walks fields and farms on three continents, not only investigating the very real threats to our food, but also telling the little-known stories of the people who are working against time to create a new and hopeful future. Food might be the problem, but as she shows, it is also the solution. The food system as we know it was assembled in a few decades; and if it can be built that quickly, it can be reassembled and improved in the same amount of time. Here the author lays out the targets we need to meet by the year 2050. -- From book jacket.

Countdown to the future of food -- Target 2020: Soil. Table for one billion: to see our future, visit sunny India -- Faster, bigger, richer, weaker : the trouble with the green revolution -- The money knot: food prices, profits, and the new global food trade -- Local versus industrial: the alternative economy of food -- The twenty-first-century peasant: but who will grow our food? -- Land as good as gold: mega-parks, mega-farms, and the global rush for farmland.

Target 2030: Seeds. Two thousand years of rice: what China knows that we don't -- The genes in our seeds: the big business of food security -- Lab rice: a better seed for a hotter planet -- SOS: save our seeds.

Target 2040: Culture. From home-cooked to takeout: a culture of food for the future -- The terrorists to the rescue! : the pope of Aligot and the French culinary resistance -- Culinary biodiversity: you are what your ancestors ate -- Introducing food: the culture shift -- Target 2050: the future.