Not by Bread Alone

by Naomi Mitchison

A huge consortium of commerical organizations have organized their efforts and now can produce free food for every person in the world. The principal behind the project is genetic modification of staple food products that causes these foods to become super abundant. But no one studied the economic or political balances that would be changed forever. And no one tested the altered food's effects on the human body. People start to die.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Naomi Mitchison, author of over 70 books, died in 1999 at the age of 101. She was born in and lived in Scotland and traveled widely throughout the world. In the 1960s she was adopted as adviser and mother of the Bakgatla tribe in Botswana. Her books include historical fiction, science fiction, poetry, autobiography, and nonfiction, the most popular of which are The Corn King and the Spring Queen, The Conquered, and Memoirs of a Spacewoman.

Mitchison lived in Kintyre for many years and was an active small farmer. She served on Argyll County Council and was a member of the Highlands and Islands Advisory Panel from 1947 to 1965, and the Highlands and Islands Advisory Consultative Council from 1966 to 1974.

Praise for Naomi Mitchison:

"No one knows better how to spin a fairy tale than Naomi Mitchison."
-- The Observer

"Mitchison breathes life into such perennial themes as courage, forgiveness, the search for meaning, and self-sacrifice."
-- Publishers Weekly

"She writes enviably, with the kind of casual precision which ... comes by grace."
-- Times Literary Supplement

"One of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century.... We are just catching up to this wise, complex, lucid mind that has for ninety-seven years been a generation or two ahead of her time."
-- Ursula K. Le Guin, author of Gifts

"Her descriptions of ritual and magic are superb; no less lovely are her accounts of simple, natural things -- water-crowfoot flowers, marigolds, and bright-spotted fish. To read her is like looking down into deep warm water, through which the smallest pebble and the most radiant weed shine and are seen most clearly; for her writing is very intimate, almost as a diary, or an autobiography is intimate, and yet it is free from all pose, all straining after effect; she is telling a story so that all may understand, yet it has the still profundity of a nursery rhyme.
-- Hugh Gordon Proteus, New Statesman and Nation

Reviews

[Adam Stevenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not By Bread Alone is a story set twenty years in the future and spans continents.

Oddly, given the time it was written, it would be set now, but the book mostly works at being twenty years from any given time. A company called PAX takes an interest in a number of different biological projects. One in Australia adapts plants to grow with almost any water, one in South America affects plants so they can fertilise themselves and one in India creates plants with massively increased yield and nutrition. Slowly, over the course of the first third of the book, this projects are brought together to create free food for everyone.

Slowly is certainly the case. There’s a great deal about the contracts, safeguards and negotiations that have to happen to make freefood (as it is called) a thing. The reader learns a lot about the board members of PAX, the worries of the scientists and the processes which make their magic plants. Despite the wide spread of the ‘action’ and long time span, everything feels quite airless and claustrophobic. There’s also a number of sub-plots about people’s nationalities, religions and sexualities which seem to be included for colour and interest, showing how many types of people are involved in the project.

Freefood is a big success. In developing countries, the populations grow taller, healthier and with more time for study and infrastructure. It impacts the west less, but provides a safety net for everybody. Although all the freefood is plant based, it can also be fed to animals and so meat gets a little cheaper. Fish remains the most expensive and old-fashioned fishfingers become a luxury item. There are some complaints that it’s a little blander than the old non-free food but, with the exception of a nation of indigenous Australians, people are pretty happy. Until they are not.

Not By Bread Alone is an interesting idea but it’s a pretty lifeless book and the perceived problems of freefood seem much less urgent than the notion of being able to free everyone from starvation.

[Charlotte · Rating 2 out of 5]

What would happen if scientists developed a way to end world hunger? Not only was I unconvinced by Mitchison's projections, I found them frankly reeking of disinterest in the perspective of those populations regularly beset by famines. Worse, the "objective correlative" - the story! - failed to engage my interest. I didn't feel much for the characters, which felt like strangely abstracted collections of thoughts and background notes, and I'm not sure the writer did, either: those we knew by name were, for the most part, left in suspension at the end of the book.