41 pages • 1 hour read
Hope JahrenThe Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 2, Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Food”
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “Growing Grain”
Jahren shifts from human population statistics to agricultural statistics, with a primary focus on the region in which she grew up: “While the Heartland makes up only 15 percent of the land area of the United States, it is home to more than half of its farm fields” (28). Jahren describes the seasonal agricultural routine of her home in Minnesota, including the farming of soybeans and corn. These two types of plants are often planted side by side.
While the farm fields in both the Midwest and across the world are producing three times the amount of product now that they were 50 years ago, the acreage of land dedicated to agriculture has not significantly increased: “How did we come to be growing three times more food on only 10 percent more land? The answer has to do with gigantic increases in yield—the amount produced per footprint of soil” (31). Key to this increased yield are farmers’ access to better nutrients for their plants, the development of stronger herbicides and pesticides, and the scientific breakthrough in plant genetics to create genetically modified organisms (GMOs). GMOs do not pose a health risk for consumers, as many believe. The powerful corporate structure that controls the sale of seeds, however, is more problematic.
Scientists and farmers have learned to engineer fields that produce a single crop by closely regulating fertilizer use, irrigated water supplies, and the elimination of pests, or what is called monoculture. A majority of the crops monoculture produces go straight to feeding not humans but cattle.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “Raising Meat”
In wealthier nations, meat consumption is excessive. On a daily basis, Americans eat 10 items derived from meat products, which come from at least 10 individual animals. This lifestyle requires the slaughter of millions of animals each day: “Since 2011, global production of meat has exceeded three hundred million tons per year—this is three times the amount that was produced in 1969” (45-46). A third of the grains grown around the world go to feeding animals for slaughter, a supply chain system that neglects the eight million undernourished people who would greatly benefit from access to those grains.
Like crops, the global increase in meat production is due to increased yield. “We feed animals better now than we did then, we protect them better, and we have also improved the animals themselves,” Jahren writes (46). The increase in both crop yield and animal yields demonstrates Jahren’s “story of more”: more corn and soy products fed into the bellies of cattle; more water dedicated to raising and slaughtering animals; more antibiotics to keep the animals healthy enough to grow; and finally, more meat on the dinner plate.
Part 2, Chapters 5-6 Analysis
Again, this chapter hinges on Jahren’s personal upbringing in the United States, which prefaces her discussion of global agricultural statistics. For Jahren, Minnesota is a microcosm of the larger world. Her hometown’s regional farm fields were “genuinely representative of what was happening the world over” (30). Jahren does not offer a decisive opinion on monoculture. Her underlying message seems to be that highly engineered fields and crops are necessary to feed the world’s population. However, her remark that most of our current agricultural yield goes to feeding livestock lays the groundwork for the following chapter’s critique of the meat industry.
When it comes to animal slaughter itself, Jahren adopts a neutral stance: “Can I confess something? I am tired of debating the morality of animal slaughter, and I don’t tire easily” (49). Instead, Jahren encourages her readers to reduce the amount of meat they consume on a weekly basis by half. In this sense, she does make meat consumption a moral issue, though more for its effects on humans than on animals: “At present, we are choosing ourselves over our own grandchildren three times a day when we ignore the problem, pick up our forks, and take another bite of meat” (51).
Jahren again uses the tactic of hard data—a swift dose of numbers—to shock her reader. “Sooner or later,” she writes, “we will have to reconsider the fact that every year, we actively waste 90 percent of the grain we feed to animals, in exchange for a little meat and a lot of manure” (51). Jahren’s difficult statistics of animal and human death may leave the reader wondering what, if any, silver lining exists.
Jahren’s dedication to her personal life’s timeline sometimes makes her argument and research shortsighted. For example, she writes that “When [she] was in high school, more than 80 percent of Iowa was farmland. And today, thirty years later, more than 80 percent of Iowa is farmland. Iowa has never not been more than 80 percent farmland” (38). This statement overlooks the relatively short history of white, Euro-American colonists farming in the Midwest. A century before Jahren’s birth, 80% of Iowa was not dedicated to monocrop farmland but was instead the domain of multiple Indigenous American tribes, including the Ioway, Illini, Otoe, and Dakota Sioux.
