Feeding The World WellFrom Field To Fork: Food Ethics For Everyone By Thompson Paul B. New York (NY) : Oxford University Press , 2015 344 pp., $21.95

One of the great dilemmas of our time is how to provide plentiful, healthy, and nutritious food for all, doing so in an environmentally sustainable and safe manner. The health, environmental, economic, and societal costs will be substantial if we don’t change our course of action when it comes to feeding the world. Yet solving this problem is riddled with ethical and moral implications. The author and environmental activist Wendell Berry once wrote, “Eating is an agricultural act.” Reading Paul Thompson’s new book, From Field to Fork , one would argue that eating is an ethical act as well. Through the act of eating, we are more than just consumers. Food is an essential aspect of human functioning, existence, and experience. “Food has a powerful integrative effect on the moral imagination,” writes Thompson, the W. K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food, and Community Ethics at Michigan State University. “Otherwise diverse and distinct social problems come together around food.” His insights help define the exceptionalism of food in our society

Options for keeping the food system within environmental limits

The food system is a major driver of climate change, changes in land use, depletion of freshwater resources, and pollution of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems through excessive nitrogen and phosphorus inputs. Here we show that between 2010 and 2050, as a result of expected changes in population and income levels, the environmental effects of the food system could increase by 50–90% in the absence of technological changes and dedicated mitigation measures, reaching levels that are beyond the planetary boundaries that define a safe operating space for humanity. We analyse several options for reducing the environmental effects of the food system, including dietary changes towards healthier, more plant-based diets, improvements in technologies and management, and reductions in food loss and waste. We find that no single measure is enough to keep these effects within all planetary boundaries simultaneously, and that a synergistic combination of measures will be needed to sufficiently mitigate the projected increase in environmental pressures.</p