I’ve enjoyed reading Louise Fresco’s [amazon_link id=”0691163871″ target=”_blank” ]Hamburgers in Paradise: the stories behind the food we eat[/amazon_link], but find it hard to sum up – almost certainly because I’ve read it in short chunks at night. Indeed it lends itself to that manner of reading because there are ‘stories’ and the chapters have lots of short sections. My take-away (hah!) is that the book tries to find a path between the naivety of the anti-globalisers, and anti-GMO campaigners, the romanticism of the slow food types in a world where 7 billion people need feeding on a necessarily industrial scale, and the complacency of those who dismiss the campaigners. She does believe a lot needs to change about the way food is produced, distributed, sold and consumed. Maybe this is why I like it so much – the message ‘it’s really complicated and there are uncomfortable trade-offs’ rings true.

[amazon_image id=”0691163871″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Hamburgers in Paradise: The Stories behind the Food We Eat[/amazon_image]

The chapter on GMOs is a good example. Fresco starts with the continuities. Genetic modification is a continuation of practices dating back to the agricultural revolution – domestication was the first step – and has accelerated in the past century with systematic hybridization. Modern plant breeding is a continuation of the past 10,000 years. The fears aroused by genetic modification – and that’s only in Europe – are to that extent misplaced. But Fresco does not dismiss the fear, for as she notes there has been a discontinuity, both in the use of transgenic techniques, and in the situation in which this kind of modification takes place – not by famers but by a large multinational, playing down side effects, hiding information, and clearly aiming to garner for its shareholders all the new benefits of the techniques. As she notes also, many farmers could improve yields with existing techniques – if they knew how – without going for GM versions. Cassava, a staple food without which millions of people in Sub Saharan Africa, is a prime target for genetic improvements to reduce its toxicity, and enhance growth of its mineral-rich leaves, but the yield in central Africa is only 15% of the yield in Brazil. It will never match that but there is plenty of headroom.

The book begins and ends with Paradise and the Fall, due to Eve’s hunger for (forbidden) knowledge. The underlying thread is the danger of playing with nature – when this has to be done to feed the world’s growing population and when for so much of human history in so many places food has been scarce. She ends with the hope for a new kind of paradise: “We can hope to find there our true human nature, not as spoiled mortals for whom food falls out of the trees, not as greedy leeches who appropriate everything that comes within our grasp, nor as naive worshippers of an idyll, but in full consciousness of what a scientific understanding of the ecology of the earth can bring us in the light of our real needs.”

She continues: “Without food there is no evolution and no civilisation. We are what we eat, literally, through the molecules we absorb from nature. What it means to be human is concentrated in food and our understanding of it.” A very humane book, ranging widely over subjects from obesity to the organic and slow food movements, from fish farming to the landscape, full of new-to-me information, and beautifully written.