What do two high school pals write about when they’re all grown up and living an ocean apart? Why, Empires of Food: Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations. The authors, one an agricultural expert (Evan D.G. Fraser) and the other a journalist (Andrew Rimas), recount with meaty and incredibly captivating detail the systems humans have created to feed our metastasizing populations, the fickle natural phenomena on which those systems rely, and the collapses that inevitably follow. And they gracefully warn that our current food system is following in the footsteps of millennia of incredibly efficient yet inflexible models of production and distribution.

Part food history, part ancient travel narrative, part socioeconomic manifest, Empires of Food throws light on a few modern movements that, though falling short of a solution in and of themselves, have pushed the global community a step closer to recognizing and inching back from the precipice upon which we teeter. Here Fraser answers some of our questions about how we feed ourselves and what we can do differently.

What inspired you to co-write Empires of Food?

As we were writing our first book Beef: The Untold Story of Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World (which was about what we eat and why we eat it and the implications), we discovered that how we get our food is actually more interesting that what we’re eating. That book brought us in touch with the vegetarian and vegan communities which were incredibly anti-meat. But just as there can be an unsustainable steak, there can be a very wicked salad.

Not all land is meant for growing crops. For example, Yorkshire [England] is ideal pasture country. Raising and producing dairy, the lamb, the beef all makes very good use of the landscape. Turning this area into arable land would cause terrible erosion and soil degradation.

And as we started thinking about how we produce food, there was a pattern. Cities grew up around producing surpluses and exploiting an overproduction of produce. And surpluses tend to happen when the climate cooperates. These trends don’t continue in the long-term.

Modern arguments only look at the last 200 years. If you take a step back and look at the last 12,000 years, you see this pattern. The system that we rely on today has a lot of similarities in the way it is organized to the systems of the past. You see these points where societies go from affluence to being very uncomfortable– the end of the Roman Empire, the end of the 13 century. There are abrupt turn arounds.