Giving Compass' Take:

• Danielle Nierenberg at Food Tank commends Amanda Little’s book, The Fate of Food, for portraying the value of both technology and tradition in the food supply system.

• How can funders help expand research on fresh and local food and nutrition?

• Here's an article on investing to strengthen the good food supply system. 

In The Fate of Food, author Amanda Little features doomsday strategies like freeze-dried chicken pot pies and community preppers across the United States—in an effort to gauge if the world failed to find a way to feed the growing population.

Little elaborates that these technology-driven survival techniques do not quite solve the world’s dilemma. “We want assurance not just that there will be enough food for all of us to survive, but that our culinary traditions, including our fresh-food supply, will continue to live on,” writes Little.

The global food system needs options, adds Little, that can withstand complex threats to the food supply including industrial agriculture’s role in waste, undernutrition, overconsumption, biodiversity erasure, and agricultural consolidation: all with the arriving impacts of climate change.

These options for feeding a growing population fall into two camps, describes Little: the deinvention camp—which calls for pre-Green Revolution era farming practices—and the reinvention camp—which touts the advantages of technology and intelligence in the food system. In a Washington Post book review of Little’s book, Danielle Nierenberg, President of Food Tank, reiterates that this dichotomy curbs progress and potential. Rather, solutions must combine traditional and technological approaches.

Read the full article on saving the food supply by Katherine Walla at Food Tank.