APOCALYPSE CHOW

Why the future of our food supply is in danger

YOU’D better like tapioca — because it looks like we’re going to have to eat a lot more of it in the future. Tapioca pudding is made from cassava root, a woody shrub native to South America which grows from nothing, requires little fertilizer and can thrive just fine during dry and hot years. In a world where resources are more strained, it will become an increasingly important ingredient. “We will, most certainly, have to eat more cassava, a plant that grows where little else will,” writes Rob Dunn in his new book, “Never Out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply And Our Future” (Little Brown). This is just one takeaway from Dunn’s thoroughly frightening new book, which describes how the diversi- ty of the foods we eat has dwindled as society has modernized. Thirty thousand years ago our ancestors regularly consumed hundreds of plant and animal species that varied with the seasons. If a bug hit one species, we could easily adapt and replace it with others. Not anymore.

People in most countries are eating more calories than ever — but those calories are also less varied than ever before. Today, 80 percent of the calories we consume come from just 12 species. The bulk of our nutrition comes from wheat, corn, potatoes, soybeans, meat and dairy, while regional crops like sorghum, millet and sweet potatoes have become increasingly less important.

Though we grow more food than ever before — and fewer people go hungry in the world than at any time in history — we are today more vulnerable to natural catastrophes, global warming, eco-terrorism and health issues like diabetes and heart disease, writes Dunn.

Our abundance “is tenuous, dependent on our ability to protect the very few species on which we now depend,” writes Dunn. “The problem is that nearly all those key species are in trouble, because in simplifying the production of our food we achieved short-term benefits at the expense . . . of long-term sustainability.”

By 2050, the global demand for food is estimated to more than double. Turning to other food stuffs, such as cassava root, isn’t the only solution offered by the book. Dunn says we can also shop locally at farmer’s markets, be more daring with our veggies, and eat less meat (“Meat eating is nearly always a waste of food resources relative to eating plants,” Dunn writes).

We should also bone up on our food supply facts, like these, extracted from Dunn’s book . . .