The Atlas of Food: Who Eats What, Where and Why
by Erik Millstone
and Tim Lang
Published by Earthscan (Earthscan Atlas Series)
Second edition (19 Sep 2008) / 128 pages / rrp £12.99
Available from amazon.co.uk / amazon.com
/ Borders UK / local UK book shops
Every day, the world’s food system has 6.5 billion mouths to feed. It’s humanity’s single biggest undertaking: 1.3 billion farm-workers work 4.9 billion Ha with 26.2 million tractors, applying $30.2 billion worth of pesticides, to produce 356 kg of grain each year for every person alive.
Still the system isn’t working: “2 billion people suffer from chronic under-nutrition and 18 million die each year from hunger-related diseases”. The 356 kg would be plenty to feed everyone if equally shared, but distribution is far from equal despite global trade flows of 774 millions tonnes of food a year. We’re producing enough food (for now) and moving it around the earth’s surface in vast quantities, but we’re still failing to adequately feed a third of the world’s population.
Meanwhile, agriculture faces increasing challenges: climate change, soil degradation (9% of the world’s agricultural land is suffering “strong, extreme” soil degradation and a further 43% “moderate”), water shortages (26 countries are forecast to be suffering water scarcity by 2050 and a further 12 water stress) and resource constraints. All this and a further 3 billion people to feed by 2050, with growing demand for resource-hungry meat and dairy products.
Understanding the world’s food system better is essential if we’re to face these challenges and move towards a more equitable and sustainable way of feeding ourselves. The burden of understanding and action weighs on each of us: we’re all participants in the global food system, whether as consumers, producers or both.
Tim Lang and Erik Millstone’s updated edition of The Atlas of Food in an invaluable guide to the complexities and scale of world food, presenting clear maps and charts of the many elements of our production, trade, marketing and consumption of food. The graphics illustrate the figures behind our food and highlight striking geographic variations; tucked away at the back of the book are detailed tables of the source data and references.
The authors’ mostly restrained commentary helps to elicit meaning from the figures and graphs. There’s an underlying polemic of sustainability (no surprises there), but the authors rely mostly on the force of the information to guide our thinking (though there are few easy answers to the issues faced by such a complex system):
- The percentage of the US beef trade controlled by the top four companies grew from 72% to 81% between 1990 and 2000
- It takes 930 kg of grain to feed a person for a year on a meat-based diet, just 180 kg on a grain-based diet
- 75% of all EU agricultural land is used for growing animal feed
- Denmark slaughters 3,986 pigs per 1,000 people per year; the world average is 194
- Agricultural wages in Mexico are 15% of manufacturing wages
- Namibia has lost 26% of its agricultural labour force to AIDS
- 30% of Russia’s food is produced on suburban land
- 14% of London households grow vegetables in the garden
- 65% of fish stocks are fully exploited or over-exploited
- Of 649 identified pig breeds, 151 are extinct, 58 critical and 106 endangered
- 80% of farmers in developing countries do not need to change their methods to be certified organic
- Australia exports over 5 million live sheep each year to the Middle East
These are just a handful of the indicators of the state of our food system provided by The Atlas of Food. Immerse yourself in the book’s facts, figures and charts, and draw your own conclusions.
(All quotes and figures – unless otherwise referenced – are taken from The Atlas of Food: Who Eats What, Where and Why (The Earthscan Atlas Series) – first edition.)
. Locavores 
