Oil, Food, and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture

“Without your support I would have given up on this long ago. And without your positive input, I would have drowned in pessimism.”

The lines quoted above were written by Dale Allen Pfeiffer to his wife in the dedication to his book Eating Fossil Fuels. What does it mean when an author begins a work with an allusion to his “drowning in pessimism” and ends with a chapter entitled “Twelve Fun Activities for Activists”? With Dale Allen Pfeifer, it must be an insight into how gravely he views his subject and how hard he has worked to gain any kind of positive perspective on it. What his book describes regarding world food production is as sobering as the darkest side of global warming. It warrants this kind of grim concern.


Eating Fossil Fuels begins and ends with a very basic assessment, something that too few people completely understand or think about, and yet is absolutely critical to our well-being on planet Earth: our food supply is highly dependent on hydrocarbons, whether as fossil fuel or petrochemical additives. In the 1950s and 1960s when population growth threatened to outrun food stores, an international agricultural program, now referred to as the Green Revolution, was initiated to increase farm production all around the world through the intensified use of petrochemical fertilizers and irrigation. The results were impressive. Production nearly tripled. In the years since, low cost fossil fuels have increasingly become a critical part of all facets of industrial agriculture from the growing to the packaging to the transportation to the preparation of the product, to the extent, as Mr. Pfeiffer would say, we are all but eating fossil fuel.

Mud City Press