How to Feed the World: The History and Future of Food by Vaclav Smil, Viking, 272 pp., $30
Vaclav Smil has some questions, as he often does. Why does one-third of the planet’s food supply end up in the garbage? Why won’t we swear off beef? Which is more important, grains or smartphones?
Standard economics calls that last one a near tie: the smartphone market and the global rice and wheat harvest were both recently valued at around $400 billion. Losing our devices would mean great inconvenience, Smil acknowledges, but losing the staple grains that provide 35 percent of global food energy “would result in unprecedented famines and the deaths of a significant portion of today’s 8 billion people.” False equivalencies like these are why Smil hates economists.
What does make him happy? Raw data. Big numbers. Cataracts of fact. Smil’s prose can veer from snappy to gnomic, often within a single passage, but at 81, he still makes statistics roar. An emeritus professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba, Smil was born in Nazi-occupied Bohemia and raised in the Soviet bloc. “I do not tolerate nonsense,” he says. “I grew up surrounded by commie propaganda—the bright tomorrow, the great future of mankind—so I’m as critical as they come.” He earned a doctorate in geography from Penn State in 1971 and soon went to Manitoba, where he still resides, a cosmopolitan exile who lives with his physician wife in a modest self-designed house and thinks about energy: its guises, its puzzles, its densities, its traps and constraints. He stays away from faculty meetings. He does not care to be a talking head. Mostly he connects far-flung dots, and his core message—delivered with the flat calm of a dentist announcing a very large root canal job—has not wavered in 50 years: either economic growth ends, or we do.
How to Feed the World is Smil’s 48th book (with three more already announced), shorter than the magisterial Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities (2019), less detailed than How the World Really Works (2022), but still a masterclass in science as horror. He has written on agriculture before, trying to explain why putting a chicken on the table requires half a bottle of crude oil. But he undertook this project because a fan “suggested, sometime in the second pandemic year, that I should take another look at food.” That fan happened to be centibillionaire Bill Gates, the largest private owner of American farmland, and also an ardent backer of synthetic meat, custom organisms, and gene-edited crops.
How to Feed the World is a hyper-speed argument that decency and profit can coexist if we accept that a cowboy economy and a spaceman economy cannot. Headlong expansion is suicidal, but so is breaking the biosphere. Smil covers the fundamentals of agriculture (energy conversion, climate, enriched soil), lucidly explains global nutritional needs, and stresses practical fixes for our profligate ways, from lowering the overall food supply in high-income countries to policing the home refrigerator for spoilage and greed. Prudence is no fun, but, in Smil’s view, caloric thrift and vigilance may save us all. Along the way, doomsayers, techno-optimists, degrowth purists, and purveyors of eco-bliss are slapped aside, not gently.
We must embrace a pragmatic, sensible middle way, Smil pleads, for two reasons. First, without a healthy planet, nothing matters. Second, though we face peak Homo sapiens in 2050, we may never quit fossil fuels: the math won’t let us, and replacement sources are emerging too slowly to matter. (Bill Gates disagrees and is plunging billions into clean-energy research.)
At the heart of the book is Smil’s briefing on global malnutrition. That ancient menace is fast retreating, thanks to the Green Revolution, but the price is a leaky, lavish, illogical, and inefficient blur of production, processing, trade, packaging, storage, distribution, sales, preparation, consumption, and waste handling. We can roast the planet to enjoy cold sodas in the Serengeti and demand blueberries in January in Anchorage, or we can admit that waste is the killer and impartial governance the solution. Even so, Smil predicts, we may not make it in time without some powerful ethical switchover, like the turn against smoking 50 years ago, that persuades us all to side with altruism over greed, if only out of self-preservation.
“When it comes to food, numbers are much more important than opinions and feelings,” writes Smil, who invests no time in coaxing or charm. His report to his species is intensely numerate and intensely remote: environmentalism practiced from 35,000 feet, sans faces, voices, anecdotes, or gripping case studies. (For the reverse approach, see the recent ground-truthing study of mega-scale waste by Donald Worster: “The Good Muck: Toward an Excremental History of China.”) Smil veers around climate change and skimps on describing solutions, and the book’s last third is weaker for it, but it is still both a fire bell in the night and an urgent act of public education in the tradition of Asimov and Sagan, Goodall and Carson, demanding that we look long, beyond chatter and hype, focus on the supremely difficult issue of intergenerational justice, and solve the equation.
In 1851, as developed nations stripped the seas for whale oil energy, Herman Melville, witness to that madness, published Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Smil rereads the novel once a year. In How to Feed the World, he once more sails the sea of fact alone, obedient only to Melville’s sermon for the Nantucket whalers: Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal. This is not an endearing book, but it is a necessary one. Waste not, want not.
