When journalism professor (and former Grist staffer) Amanda Little set out to write a book about the future of food, she figured it would take a year, maybe two. It ended up taking five.
“The central question I was asking is, how do we feed a hotter, more crowded world?” she says. “But the question kept leading to other questions, like, are we facing the end of animal meat? Will we need GMOs and gene-editing tools to help adapt to environmental pressures? Can we build a drought-proof water supply? How do we get chemicals out of the food system? How do you make sustainable food not elitist?”
Her search for answers took her around the world, into the middle of a nasty debate over how our food should be produced, and to a bunch of places that, frankly, made her squirm. “I had to look at things like GMOs and laboratory meats — things that don’t seem like part of a food future that I want to inhabit,” she said. “I needed to get a better understanding of whether some of these things will need to be part of a realistic set of solutions for climate-smart, resilient food production.”
The conclusions she reached, just published in The Fate of Food: What We’ll Ea... Read more
