Vaclav Smil loves to inundate his readers with data. Statistics, charts and graphs keep hurtling off the pages at the rate of knots. An apologist for facts and an acolyte of information, the Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba – and the author of more than forty books – is also an extraordinary researcher.

How to Feed the World is no exception to the information barrage. Dispelling many a myth about how our dietary regimens shape us, and where our food comes from, Smil leads us into a dizzying journey whose beacon is quantitative rigor and destination conclusions of incredulity. The granular details that occupy Smil’s research defies imagination and provokes undisguised astonishment. Consider this piece of information:

The metric of Water Use Efficiency (WUE) is measured in terms of new plant mass photosynthesised per unit of volume of water used by a plant. WUE also indicates how much water is needed per unit mass of crop yield. The average amount of water to yield a ton of legumes is 4,000 tonnes, while producing a ton of coffee requires a jaw dropping 18,000 tonnes of water. This prorates to a whopping 130 kilograms per cup that uses all of 7 grams of roasted beans! Incidentally, it takes a small amount of water at 300 tonnes to obtain one tonne of beer.

The fundamental premise underlying Smil’s work is his emphatic assertion that there is no need for any radical solutions to combat the problems of global food security as well as for ensuring that the next generation is adequately supplied with a fair share of nutrition. However, a combination of measures such as improving production efficiencies, reducing waste, and adjusting diets would need to be implemented in a homogenous and urgent manner universally.

The chapter dwelling on food waste makes for sobering and infuriating reading. As Smil points out, according to a Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) study, households in the United Kingdom waste 6.7 million tonnes of food every year. The wastage amounted to a third of all food purchases, with three fifths of such wastage being perfectly avoidable. But the most remarkable, and frustrating feature about the whole wastage statistics lay in the fact that more than a quarter of all the avoidable waste was discarded unopened!

Inefficient methods of food production also result in significant, and in cases, irreparable damage such as deforestation, ground water depletion, heavy metal contamination etc. As is his leitmotif, Smil puts us into a tailspin with a raft of mind-blowing statistics. While Hunan province in China has the unenviable attribute of having three-fifths of all its food contaminated by Mercury, Amazon’s annual rate of deforestation at 27,800 square kilometres equates to the loss of forestland the size of Belgium every year!

Smil also holds forth on the benefits touted by nutritionists and dieticians about the virtues of attempting a myriad number of ingenious gastronomic choices. Paleo, vegan, substitutes, restrictive diets and dietary fats all have had their fifteen minutes of undiluted fame. Smil in an impartial and irreverent manner, weighs the pros and cons of such recommendations, providing data on the inputs in terms of natural and manufactured resources that would be required to facilitate such diets, the energy equivalents and outcome in terms of benefits.

Smil calls for an immediate mitigation mechanism to be instituted to combat zinc, iodine and iron deficiency representing preventable cases of global malnutrition and even deaths. This unfortunate trend is seen mostly in the case of children in sub-Saharan Africa. It is an absolute travesty that a most inexpensive method of iodisation involving the use of fortified salt with iodine (at least 15 parts per million) is out of reach of millions of helpless families.

Smil also informs us about the realities in terms of costs when it comes to novel inventions such as lab processed meat. According to Huw Hughes, owner/director of Echo Veterinary Consulting, the real cost of a kilogram of cell culture is anywhere more than $8,500 – $36,000. This is comparison to the wholesale price of trimmed chicken meat at $3.11 per kilogram (as of February 2021).

How to Feed the World is a wonderfully compelling and eye-opening guide dealing with a fundamental necessity of life which a great proportion of us take for granted. After reading this food, not only will we think twice about how much we put on our plates but also lend attention – crucially – to where and how the stuff adorning our plates have come about.