Feeding the Future, the second collection of thematically linked essays edited by Investeco Capital president Andrew Heintzman and CBC personality and writer Evan Solomon (the two were also co-founders of Shift magazine), is subtitled From Fat to Famine: How to Solve the World’s Food Crises. It’s an ambitious premise, and something of a false promise, as one might expect. While solutions to the issues surrounding food and nutrition are in short supply, the volume does an impressive and succinct job of outlining the problems.

Feeding the Future is the second book from the Ingenuity Project, a three-year-old multidisciplinary project dedicated to finding “a deeper understanding of the most intractable challenges facing the world – to discover practical solutions.” Rooted in the principles of Thomas Homer-Dixon’s bestselling The Ingenuity Gap, the project proposes using both technical ingenuity (inventions and technologies) and social ingenuity (institutions, laws, and relationships) to address the most pressing of contemporary social issues.

Last year’s Fueling the Future serves as the template for Feeding the Future: a collection of essays from some of “the clearest, brightest minds from around the globe,” with a unifying introduction from a marquee name. This time out, that name is Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation. His concise introduction serves to make clear the stakes involved. “Uniformity and conformity,” Schlosser writes, “blind faith in science, a narrow measure of profit and loss, a demand for total control – these are the values of the current food system. A new one will emerge from an opposing set.”

The essays in Feeding the Future demonstrate the irreducible complexity and interlocking nature of issues as seemingly straightforward as food and nutrition. Every bowl of food we consume serves as a locus point for scientific progress, history, politics, social structures, and beliefs. Pressure on one strand causes vibrations throughout the whole. Any solution to problems in one area will resonate in – and face opposing forces from – other areas.

The invited essayists do an impressive job of rendering these complexities into (relatively) digestible form without
dumbing down the material. Particularly significant are “Diet for a Smaller Planet,” a new essay from Anna Lappe and her mother Frances Lappe, whose Diet for a Small Planet was a paradigm-shifting, pioneering work in the history of food writing and food systems awareness, and “Saving Agriculture from Itself,” an incisive overview of farming and rural culture by business reporter Stuart Laidlaw.

“The High-Tech Menu,” by William I. Atkinson, is a spirited and informed defence of genetic modification. Most readers won’t be convinced (and the anti-GMO tone of the remainder of the book won’t help), but it’s a worthwhile read and (no pun intended) food for thought.

Among the volume’s many highlights is “Betting the Farm: Food Safety and the Beef Commodity Chain,” a thorough and carefully reasoned analysis of Canada’s system of slaughter facilities, inspections, and classes of approvals and gradings, and the terrifying potential for mad cow disease. Ian MacLachlan’s “Fish or Cut Bait: Solutions for Our Seas” is an examination of industrial fishing and seafood farming by Carl Safina and Carrie Brownstein. Both are terrifying in their implications and inclusive in their apportioning of blame. Mark Juhasz’s “Revitalizing the Ranch: A Mexican Farm Story,” on the other hand, leaves the volume with a sense of hope and positive change.

Feeding the Future could easily serve as a key resource for both lay readers and those in government and NGOs. Unfortunately, the book is compromised by issues of credibility. If the editors can’t be trusted with well-known, mainstream facts, how can readers rely on their veracity with specialist figures and calculations? To name two examples: diet doctor Robert Atkins died in 2003, not 1993, as the book claims; similarly, Krispy Kreme’s donut revenues were damaged by the low-carb diet craze, not by low-fat diets as the book claims.

While it’s probably no more than a matter of fact-checking, it requires a tremendous leap of faith to take any of their more advanced claims strictly at face value when some basic facts are erroneous. It’s a shame that such a strong volume should be so unnecessarily hamstrung.