cover image Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

Andrew Rimas, Evan D. G. Fraser, . . Free Press, $27 (302pp) ISBN 978-1-4391-0189-6

The agricultural revolution won't just make us fat—it could make us extinct.

Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations Evan D.G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas . Free Press , $27 (304p) ISBN 978-1-4391-0189-6

The agricultural system that sustains modern society will eventually destroy it, argues this gloomy ecohistory. Leeds University agricultural researcher Fraser and Boston journalist Rimas survey a range of premodern civilizations, including Sumer, Han China, and medieval Europe, to distill the common features that allowed them to feed large urban populations: farming specialization, surpluses, trade, transportation, and food storage. Alas, the authors contend, these “food empires” bred soaring populations, exhausted soils, led to deforestation and erosion, which together with a turn in the climate, led to famine and collapse. They apply this neo-Malthusian lesson to our “cancerous” mega-agriculture, based on artificial fertilizer, fossil fuels, and mono-cropping. The authors' tour of food empires past, framed by an irrelevant narrative of a 16th-century Florentine merchant, is interesting but scattershot. Further, they fail to convince on why technological innovations in agriculture will fail, and lapse into a dubious brief for locavorism. (June 15)