The Last Bite: A Critic at Large: The New Yorker
Referencing English demographer and political economist Thomas Malthus along with these books, the New Yorker article argues that, as a whole, the planet is not suffering from a shortage of food but from too much: “Our ability to produce vastly too many calories for our basic needs has skewed the concept of demand, and generated a wildly dysfunctional market.”
It’s a market in which one billion overweight humans fed on factory-farmed protein and stocks of depleted fish outnumber eight-hundred million who go hungry. A classic case of haves vs. have-nots but with dire consequences that we’re already beginning to see. “What we are witnessing is not the end of food but a market on the brink of failure. Those bearing the brunt are, as in Malthus’s day, the people at the bottom.”