The End of Food

Thomas Pawlick attempts to expose the agenda behind corporate agribusinesses in The End of Food. Surely, it doesn't even cross the minds of most consumers that through the corporatization of foodstuffs, produce is grown in strains that will withstand transportation and handling, meat will be treated with additives to maintain freshness, and countless other procedures will be conducted to present appealing grocery options. The problem is that these choices made for shelf-life and appearance come at a cost; nutritional value is sacrificed.

The basic underlying principle is a good one to raise, nonetheless, Pawlick is a little too ambitious with his thesis. The large-scale trend in declining food quality Pawlick backs up with data from US Department of Agriculture Food Tables as well as Canadian Nutrient Data from 1963 to the present. Pawlick claims that the downward trend has been so significant that at the rate his data indicates, within a few decades, food will no longer have any nutritional value -- we will have to rely on suppliments -- it will be "the end of food." His unabashed use of inductive reasoning is abhorrent. Just because my alarm clock goes off every morning without fail, doesn't mean the batteries won't simply crap out one day. Clearly, if we can attribute the decline in a tomato's nutritional value to opting for a more hardy strain that has less vitamin content, it isn't the case that the tomato inherently has a disease withering its nutrients. Rather, it has been substituted with a different kind of tomato and it is absurd to think that the future of the tomato is such that it will be systematically substituted for strains of asymptotically decreasing nutritional value.

Further, Pawlick's data is presented in such a manner that it is misleading. He cites data that ranges from 1963 to the present. It isn't clear whether data was collected at any intervals in-between. Also, he always quantifies data as percentages, for example, suggesting that the potato lost 100% of its vitamin A between 1963 and 2005. The initial amount of vitamin A may have just as well been a minute trace amount and maybe even a fluke at that. Needless to say, I did not even make it halfway through the book -- waste of paper.