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What it argues
The Fate of Food is Amanda Little's reporting on how food production is being reshaped by climate change and by the technologies that farmers, scientists, and food companies are deploying to respond. Little spent several years visiting farms, labs, and factories across five continents, and the book is structured as a series of dispatches from the frontier of the food transition: drought-resistant crops being trialed in drought-prone regions, vertical farms growing lettuce in windowless warehouses, Norwegian salmon farms producing fish at industrial scale, and CRISPR gene editing being applied to crops as it was once applied to medicine.
The central argument is that feeding ten billion people on a hotter, more volatile planet will require accepting both high-tech solutions and a rethinking of what food means and where it comes from. Little is sympathetic to the farmers and innovators she profiles and skeptical of the binary between industrial food and organic, local, traditional food. She finds both inadequate on their own and argues for a productive tension between the two.
What it gets right
- 1.
Climate change is already affecting agricultural yields through drought, heat stress, shifting rainfall, and new pest patterns, and these effects will intensify over coming decades.
- 2.
Feeding ten billion people at mid-century will require roughly a 70 percent increase in food production on a planet where arable land is shrinking and freshwater is increasingly scarce.
- 3.
Precision agriculture uses satellite data, sensors, and algorithmic management to optimize inputs — water, fertilizer, pesticides — reducing waste while maintaining or increasing yields.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Amanda Little is a professor of journalism and science writing at Vanderbilt University and a contributing writer to The New Yorker and Bloomberg. Her previous book, Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells, Our Ride to the Renewable Future, covered the energy transition. She has reported on environmental and agricultural issues for major publications for more than two decades. The Fate of Food, published in 2019, grew from several years of global reporting on the intersection of climate change, food systems, and emerging agricultural technology.
