The future of food
Wednesday 2 July 2008 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3)
Philip Dodd and guests discuss whether mankind has reached the end of the 'golden age of food' and, if so, what can be done about it. They consider the question of recent rises in food prices, said to be driven by a combination of greater use of bio-fuels, changing patterns of consumption in India and China as well as climate change, asking whether we been dangerously complacent. Can and should Western consumers change their relationship with food so that it is not driven by pure economic considerations? Or should we look to new technologies such as GM to deliver the changes needed to meet the problems faced today? And they ask why equal numbers of people in the world are at risk of obesity as are undernourished, while we seem to lurch from one mass production scare to the next, whether BSE or avian flu. How did we get here and could the crisis we are facing have been avoided?
Cairo Street Market
Will abundance like this be a thing of the past?
Playlist
The challenge of producing enough food to support humanity's needs has been with us since the dawn of time.
As well as food being essential to our survival, the growing sophistication of its cultivation has been integral to the development of our species; it is thought that our switch to an omnivorous diet enabled our development into the most dominant species on the planet.
And ever since, food has remained intimately related with power.
Twenty years ago we thought we had solved the problem of food production; modern agricultural methods were leading us into an era of superabundance.
Yet now we find ourselves in an era of rising food prices, riots over food shortages and the lowest global grain reserves in twenty-five years.
Nearly a billion people, one in seven, are starving. Was it hubris to consider we had solved the problem?
Are we simply not capable of producing the food we need for a growing world population?
Or is it that we can produce the food we need, but we have simply got the balance wrong, putting profit ahead of productivity.
Philip Dodd is joined by a range of guests including Colin Tudge, author of Feeding People is Easy, Dick Taverne, founder of the charity Sense About Science, and Paul Roberts, author of The End of Food to debate how we feed the world and whether our food culture needs fixing.
The End Of Food by Paul Roberts is published by Bloomsbury.
