The End of Food: How the Food Industry Is Destroying Our Food Supply and What You Can Do About It.

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

The End of Food is the latest campaign document in a crusade to liberate the holy land of real food from occupation by the infidels of corporate capitalism. It opens with an appeal for recruits, who are urged to recall the tender and toothsome delights of field-grown, vine-ripened tomatoes and ask why they must make do with the ubiquitous, hard, and wintery specimens now on offer. What follows is a re-cultivation of worked-over ground: nutritional decline in chemically supercharged produce, the elimination of flavour as a criteria in food production, an increase in levels of deleterious elements such as salt and toxins (especially in imported foods), the horrors of industrial egg production, environmental degradation, and the impoverishment of rural life occasioned by the relentless decline in the number of family farms.

Pawlick suggests a diverse arsenal: home gardening, community gardening, organic redemption, negotiating food contracts with local farmers, and a relentless opposition to consuming the products of agri-business.

Well-researched with no dearth of data, The End of Food is an entertaining rant whose truths do not depend on the socialist ideological generator that spits them out. The problem is not in the capitalist system which responds to demands for produce out of season, cheap food, picture-perfect specimens, fast food at home, and even faster food at restaurants, but in the torpidity of consumers. None of the “end-of-food” literature will change the inclinations of consumers, few of whom have ever tasted a real tomato or know how to make any meal from scratch. Pawlick’s solutions will not feed consumers at prices they are willing to pay. Industrial methods applied to shoe-making and automobile manufacturing killed the crafts, but produced items that workers could afford to buy. Industrial food production does the same. Romantic exercises in middle-class, socialist elitism will not change that.

Depending on one’s political stripe, The End of Food’s message can be terrifying, unnerving, provoking, or merely annoying. But it ought not be ignored.