Food Or War by Julian Cribb review – a stark choice and a bleak outlook
Julian Cribb is a persistent man. The veteran Australian science writer specialises in “threats to humanity”: he is what you might call an extinctionologist. Since 2010 he has published books titled The Coming Famine, Poisoned Planet and How to Survive the 21st Century (not a hopeful read) and now this. Next, perhaps, a practical volume on the stocking of the Cribb cellar. I’ll bet there’s more in his Armageddon-prep stores than a catering tin of Nescafé and some bulk-buy loo roll.
Inevitably, this latest doom-tome is a reiteration of themes Cribb – and many others in the field – have told us about before: today’s unsustainable food systems and the impossible job of feeding the estimated 10 billion people inhabiting the planet by 2050 encapsulates the multiheaded crisis humanity faces today. If you haven’t heard all this then Food Or War is a good primer, vivid and punchy. What is the most destructive implement on the planet? The human jawbone, writes Cribb. “Every year, in the course of wolfing through 8.5tn meals, it dislodges more than 75bn tonnes of topsoil, swallows 7bn tonnes of fresh water, generates 30% of our greenhouse gas emissions and distributes 5m tonnes of concentrated biocides.” But you suspect that people who have managed to avoid any knowledge of the curse of human overconsumption do not buy books like this one. Even Cribb must suspect – after all the output – that writing about the problem may be a delusion of solving it.
We need the reminder that hungry humans do unthinkable things
Nonetheless, “food or war?” is a decent way of framing the argument. I’m not convinced that world peace will follow if we sort out the consumption and resources problem, but Cribb must be right that the threat of war and famine may be the way to make humans and governments behave better in resource use. The two are intimately related: hunger has been a cause of war, a weapon during it and its aftermath’s chief horror since the dawn of history. Fear of hunger concentrates minds: Cribb quotes a psychologist who observed rickets-riddled German children hiding their bread ration rather than eating it during the poverty of the 1920s, and said that dread of hunger is worse than hunger itself.
We need the reminder that hungry humans do unthinkable things. The Soviet authorities put up posters during the Holodomor, the famine that killed millions in Ukraine in the 1930s: “To eat your own children is a barbarian act.” It is salutary for us Brits, most of whom have never experienced conflict or famine, to be reminded how fantastically unusual the comfortable life we have led is. Most of our ancestors, distant and recent, knew the misery of hunger intimately. So do 800 million people alive today.
Cribb concludes with solutions, as a book of this sort should. All of them are naive, some are intriguing. Generating $340bn annually by cutting the world’s military expenditure by 20% and using the money for eco-agriculture, rewilding, children’s education and urban farming tech is, umm, a really cool idea. Even more so is Cribb’s call for the establishment of a reverse Gilead, with “women in charge of business, politics, government, religion and society for the sake of human civilisation and its survival”. Yes, nice, but. What of the current UK farming, food and environment secretary, Theresa Villiers, who has a long record of voting against pro-environment measures in the House of Commons?
But if Cribb’s solutions are fanciful, that is a reflection of the impossible situation we find ourselves in, here on this exhausted planet. The awful thought that arises from reading this book and the like is that the most probable end of all this will be war and famine leading to massive depopulation, and that in that prospect lies the only hope of either of us – race or planet – surviving the Anthropocene. So, credit to Cribb for trying. If there is anyone with better answers, please speak up.
• Food Or War by Julian Cribb is published by Cambridge University Press (£9.99)
Alex Renton is author of Planet Carnivore: Why Cheap Meat Is Destroying the Planet (Guardian Books, £1.99)
