An Edible History of Humanity

I'm always excited to see a new book about the role of food in history. It's a fertile and fascinating topic that has been largely unexplored until relatively recently.

There are so many ways to approach this subject, so many insights and stories waiting to be woven together. Tom Standage's "An Edible History of Humanity" did, in fact, introduce me to some episodes that I haven't seen addressed in any other history of humans and food, such as the role that food provisioning has played in different wars, and the devastating famines in the Soviet Union and China during the mid twentieth century, brought about largely by the respective governments' policies aimed at convincing the rest of the world that they actually had a surplus of grain.

But Standage devotes a considerable amount of space to praising the "green revolution," the development and widespread use of nitrogen-based fertilizer and the use of hybrid seed varieties that have dramatically increased agricultural productivity during the past century, while relying disproportionately on nonrenewable energy sources and wrecking longstanding traditions in many parts of the world.

He makes the fascinating point that industrialization has almost always followed on the heels of a period of accelerated agricultural activity: in order to develop an economy where most people work at endeavors other than farming, a society first needs to figure out a way to feed more bodies with fewer people actually working the land.

Although he acknowledges that there have been drawbacks to the industrial agricultural practices that have gone hand in hand with modernization, and he assures the reader that organic agriculture will have to play a role in the next green revolution, his biases are clear simply by virtue of the amount of space he devotes to marvelling at the amazing productivity of modern agricultural technology. As someone who questions the virtues of unfettered industrialization, I was less than convinced, though I still thought it was a pretty good read.