Customer Reviews

An Edible History of Humanity

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

That food looms large at the crossroads of every major event in human history may seem obvious. Everybody's got to eat, right? Wars have long been fought over arable land or better hunting grounds. Innovations in food production - from fire to farming to frozen food - spur big changes in society.

Journalist and author ("A History of the World in Six Glasses") Standage takes these truisms and examines them up close, beginning with farming. Fire increased the abundance of food by making it more digestible, but farming was a mixed blessing. Yes, it allowed for increased population - predictable food supply, more babies since it was no longer necessary to carry the family from place to place - but the bigger population worked harder and was less healthy.

"Compared with farming, being a hunter-gatherer was much more fun," Standage points out. Studies of modern-day nomads show they spend less than 20 hours a week on food procurement. "If effect, hunter-gatherers work two days a week and have five-day weekends."

The farmers, with their monotonous grain diet, were also less healthy. Archaeological dental evidence shows that farmers suffered from nutritional stress and that height decreased 5 to 6 inches in both sexes in the 4,000 or so years it took for farming to take over the globe.

So why did they do it? "The short answer is that they did not realize what was happening until it was too late." It was a gradual process, in terms of the human lifetime. That climate change played a significant role seems to be the one thing most scientists agree on.

Standage looks at the evolution of cereal grains, particularly corn, and the role food played in developing centralized social hierarchies and religious rites before jumping on a few years to the craze for spices and the consequent push for exploration, conquest and empire.

In addition to the discovery of the Americas, Standage explores the Arab and Chinese roles in the spice trade, the "communications networks" of trade routes among Arabs, and the spread of Islam, which helped spur the European drive for alternate routes.

He looks at food's role in war, feeding an army - and its animals - being no small feat. The old proverb, "For want of a nail..." could as easily be "For want of a wagonload of hay..."

As the world grew smaller, through exploration, industrialization and invention, wars grew larger and more complicated. Standage homes in on Napoleon, showing how food supplies were an integral part of his ingenious planning and his eventual downfall.

The interconnectedness of seemingly distant things is a constant theme. Coal, for instance. As more land is cultivated, coal becomes cheaper than wood. Britain's plentiful supply spurs the invention of the steam engine (to pump out flooded mines) and greater prosperity, from more glass in British windows to a booming energy-gobbling textile industry. And into this cycle of consumption and expansion comes the potato, which helps fuel the cheap labor of the industrial revolution. And the consequent Irish famines.

In the modern era Standage looks at the Communist attempt at collectivism, the boon and bane of chemical fertilizer, and the Green Revolution with its fertilizer-dependent yields, Franken foods, and ecological impact.

Standage, business editor of The Economist, is particularly fascinated by the unintended, far-flung consequences of things, like the seemingly harmless pastime of growing a few stalks of einkorn to supplement the local nuts and berries.

Today's virtuous locavore gets a wake-up call too. Throughout the book Standage finds opportunities to measure the true overall cost/benefit ratio of eating local. Local greenhouse tomatoes in Britain, for instance, produce more carbon emissions than imports from Spain, even factoring in transportation.

And cooking accounts for the greatest percentage of energy in the food chain. "Whether you leave the lid on the pan when boiling your potatoes has more of an impact on the total carbon-dioxide emissions than whether they were grown locally or far away."

He also looks at efficiencies in various forms of transport, concluding, "the drive to and from a shop or market can produce more emissions, for a given weight of food, than the whole of the rest of its journey."

Standage packs a lot into less than 260 pages (including chapter notes and research sources). He focuses on largely familiar elements of history and examines them from an up-close, food specific perspective. The ripples of cause and effect provide the underlying theme.

The material is clear and well organized and Standage's prose style is conversational and engaging. Foodies and food-history buffs will be familiar with much of the material, but Standage puts his own stamp on it. This is an accessible, enjoyable book for anyone with an interest in food's role in history.

In general, I was disappointed in this book. I somehow expected, because of its title I suppose, that this would be an exhaustive history on human beings and their sustenance. It is nowhere near that comprehensive; however, it does offer some insights into our relationship with food as a species.

For example, there has been a great deal of controversy over GMOs -- genetically modified organisms. Some people worry that interfering with the genes of our food will have unknown consequences, and it might. However, selectively breeding certain species of plants is hardly modern; in fact, the author makes a good argument that this has likely been done since pre-history. He goes on to explain the impact that farming has had on human existence.

The author also discusses the effects of the spice trade, the use of maize, the Irish potato famine, and explores the oft-heard saying that "an army marches on its stomach." Toward the end of the book he talks about nitrogen and the impact of fertilizers.

All in all this felt like a grab bag of factoids about plant foods over the course of human history. Yes, there are some good points, but the book tends to be repetitive and the history rarely strays beyond what any decently educated person should know.

For two excellent references on food, try "The Oxford Companion to Food," and "On Food & Cooking." Both are wonderful books that should satisfy most anyone's curiosity about our "edible history."

Anyone who has read much history and followed current events will learn little here. For those who haven't, this is a summary of many sources in one place - hence the three stars.

This was very dryly written, but don't worry - if you miss something the first time it will reappear later. A couple of things to keep in mind: Hunter-gatherers owned few or no possessions; Food was used to pay taxes which were in turn used to pay government workers. Among many others, you will be reminded of them over and over again. Too many times I said to the author "I got it the first time!"

Restating things, if enough pages have passed, can be a good thing. Rewording some concepts to insure clarity can also be good. Standage, however, detracts from the enjoyment of the book with this practice and his habit of stating the obvious.

This was a disappointing read.

(Based on an "Advance Reading Copy")

The stories in this book slightly expand upon well-known history (high-school level) with only short excursions into the food aspects of those stories, and even some of those are part of the standard curriculum. There are lots of additional little details that make the stories lively and interesting while you are reading them, but don't add to the "takeaways".
-- If you are already interested in history (like me), there is very little that you will find new or worth repeating. The extent to which the stories are pared down (omissions and over-simplifications) can become annoying.
-- If you come to this book intrigued by the title but with little background in history, this level of detail is beneficial.
-- If you remember only basic history, the stories provide some additional depth: "That's interesting" but not "Wow".

If your only brush with the study of history has been in required courses, this is a member of a large class of books that demonstrate how looking at events from different perspectives can be fun. However, for a much more satisfying introductory food-centric view of history and economics, I would recommend the book Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures.

The book's writing itself is very good: clear, concise and disciplined (except for the final chapter). The story-telling is well done, and my reaction in the early chapters was that stories were cut off too soon (just as things seemed to be getting interesting).

Some other reviews commented on unnecessary repetition, but I didn't find it annoying. I saw the problem as the stories not having enough depth to allow enough variability in the necessary reminders of the themes.

I expected the book to explore transformative events--where the food itself changed society/history and vice versa--but those that are included here are also found in generic introductory history books and courses. In too many stories, especially from Ch 9 (pg 145) on, food is merely incidental. For example, the Berlin Airlift (1948-49) involved replacing truck and train transport with aircraft. The exact nature of the cargo--food, fuel, whatever--is irrelevant to the story. Similarly, the "spice trade" (Ch 5) was not about food, but a range of luxury goods in which spices were prominent. Aside: technically spices may not qualify as food (nourishment), but simply be additives.

The focus is almost entirely on the major global food crops, largely ignoring animals and crops of local significance. Rice does not get its due. I don't remember legumes (beans et al) or fruit being mentioned.

The book also focuses on the relationship of food to political power. There is negligible attention to the technological aspects--from tools to architecture and urban design--which I find the more fascinating. Canning and manufacturing fertilizer are the only ones I remember being mentioned here.

The book also fails to make connections and to apply themes developed in one portion of the book to stories in another. And it misses connections from the past to the present. These connections are a major part of the fun (and "Wow") of this class of histories.

For those with a background in history: In various stories, I spotted serious omissions and obsolete interpretations that, although they didn't really bear on the point being made, did raise my skepticism.

The "Notes" section provides minimal linkages from the Parts (pairs of chapters) into the References. Many of the references are specialized academic journals and limited publication books. While I understand the requirement for such references, this book is being marketed to a mass audience and the Notes/References should provide links useful to that audience: While some of the references are available, finding them amongst the others probably involves more effort than the typical reader will invest.

Comparison to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel: Multiple reviews make favorable comparisons, but for me they were worlds apart. I found lots of interesting details and analyses in the Diamond book that were new to me.

Additional Recommendation (2009-05-20): 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. The descriptions of various Indian societies includes a much more sophisticated, richer and broader perspective on food, from hunter-gatherers to predominantly agricultural with many combinations between. Many people do not realize that many so-called hunter-gatherers "farmed" wild animals, substantially modifying the environment to encourage their growth (numbers and usable meat) and then "harvested" them. Example, Indians cut down huge swathes of forests from the Mississippi to the Appalachians to bring buffalo herds east. Example, they burned forests to make better habitat for deer. Similarly, they modified the environment to favor plants that they favored, often crossing into the gray area where they would plant seeds, but not do any other of the activities regarded as "agriculture". And do check out the critiques of this book--many are interesting and informative.

The book's claim that humans _chose_ to go from hunter-gatherers to fixed-site agriculture is contrary to the histories I learned: Those histories attributed the change to being forced by population growth. After the human population has exceeded the "carrying capacity" of the land, the alternatives to starving were expansion (conquest), emigration (if there is anywhere to go) or modifying the environment to produce more food. This produced the stages mentioned in the previous paragraph. This theory also provides a much better explanation for what the book notes about the transition: harder, longer work and decreased health.

Why three stars: Halfway through the book, I knew it had problems and was thinking "4 stars?" but subsequent chapters were poorer and the final chapters forced. In writing this review, I found myself struggling to find good things to say about the book, but I balanced that against my reactions while reading the book.

------- Overview of chapters -------
Ch 1 ("The Invention of Farming"): A quick, clean introduction to domestication and breeding of plants. But not relevant until much later in book.
Ch 2-4 ("The Roots of Modernity", "Food, Wealth and Power", "Follow the Food"): The transition from hunter-gatherers to agriculture and settlements and larger societies. Focus on power relationships, not the technology changes. Again a quick overview, with nothing that you wouldn't have encountered in any introduction to this topic.
Ch 5&6 ("Global Highways of Food": "Splinters of Paradise" & "Seeds of Empire"): The spice trade (routes and participants) and related European colonization. Voyages of exploration. Interesting 3-page segment on modern transportation costs for food, including why local food can have the larger carbon footprint.
Ch 7 ("New World, New Food"): Standard account with additional specificity on the advantages of maize (corn) and potatoes. Ignores massive problems maize can cause (famine, societal collapse).
Ch 8 ("The Steam Engine and the Potato"): Overly condensed account of Irish Potato Famine. Triangular trade (ch 7) yields high-sugar English diet.
Ch 9 ("Fuel of War"): In most popular accounts of wars, the role of logistics is grossly underrepresented. Several well-known examples (Napoleon in Russia, Sherman's March to the Sea, ...). Examples not well connected, and I thought there were better choices. Food involved simply as the predominant category of supplies. Cites Rommel in North Africa in WW2 where petrol ("food" for the machines) was the primary logistical constraint.
Ch 10 ("Food Fight"): Berlin Airlift, Famines from collectivizations under Stalin and Mao, pontificating about role of (generic) food in politics.
Ch 11 ("Feeding the World"): Fertilizer and adapting crops to fertilizer-intensive cultivation.
Ch 12 ("Paradoxes of Plenty"): Lecturing on recent changes in world economies in which food plays some role. Statistic-laden summaries. Few relevant observations on current trends.
Epilogue ("Ingredients of the Future"): Seed banks.

------- Examples for above assessment -------

Missed connections: The book mentions that the Roman Empire held sway over its vast territories through a network of roads and supply depots (pg 148), allowing troops to move quickly to trouble spots. The book mentions the massive balance-of-trade deficits from the spice trade (pp 72-73), but fails to connect those (and other) deficits to the military decline of the Roman Empire. Because gold was leaving the Empire at an unsustainable rate (faster than they could mine it, with failures to replace depleted mines), they couldn't afford to keep the depots adequately stocked, nor feed the frontline troops, who then had to raise their own food. The frontier went from being held by (full-time) professional soldiers to the equivalent of militias (eg, the US National Guard or Active Reserve) that had little hope of rapid reinforcement when attacked.

Missed connection: When discussing the true costs of corn-based ethanol as fuel, it omits the substantial transportation costs (has to move by tank car/truck because it would corrode existing pipelines). Surprising since such differentials were cited in an earlier section (pg 102-104 "Local and Global Foods").

Ignoring non-global foods: When I was touring various castles in northern Europe, I was perplexed that some had stunningly large dovecotes, while others had only relatively small ones. The reason given? Turnips. Before the arrival of turnips, the overwintering of animals was severely limited in both species and quantity because of the cost of their food and the difficulty of storing it. Doves provided an important source of protein in the winter and spring because they could feed themselves by gleaning the fields and then be "harvested" as needed. With turnips, you had a highly nutritious food (for many animals) that could be "stored" in the fields (dug up during winter as needed). Remember animals provided not just food but muscle and locomotive power (and fiber and hides), and their increased availability expanded the economy. I had expected to find stories such as this, but didn't encounter a single one.

Irish Potato Famine oversimplification: Many accounts of these events mislead you into thinking that Ireland was primarily subsistence farmers when there were large estates growing grain predominantly for export. This book points this out, but then soft-pedals the failure of the English response: It ignores that there were large stores of grain immediately available and deliberate decisions were made to continue exporting rather than redirecting them to famine relief. This book jumps past this to the Corn Laws (which limited imports of grain).

Missed analysis: The book mentions that the potato blight hit hard in many countries other than Ireland, but fails to explain why they didn't have a famine. The difference was that Ireland was a de facto colony. The results (massive deaths) would have been the same if the underlying problem had been any of a wide range of other massive "natural" disasters (for example, disease). Similarly in the (politically induced) famines of Stalin and Mao, the agricultural regions were treated like colonies, with the cities (industrial regions) as the central power. The story would have been the same if the colonies' resources had not been crops, but minerals, timber, fish, etc.

Outdated analysis/missed connection to now: The section on the fall of the Soviet Union attributes it to the inefficiencies of collective farms. However, some recent analyses have greatly expanded the role of corruption: Counter-productive choices were deliberately made based upon what officials and their cronies could steal. One example was that an area ideally suited to wheat (domestic crop) but poorly suited for nut orchards was used for the latter because it was an export (cash) crop, that is, one where payments to officials could easily be hidden. The book could have used this to make a connection to its discussion of the inefficiency of corn-based ethanol in the US (a politically dictated requirement based upon special interest influence hiding behind slogans).

Questionable analysis: Conversion of East Africans to Islam: The book cites it as a consequence of positive trading relationships (pg 77), but other analyses point to protection from Arab slavers who were very active in the region (Islam forbids enslaving other Muslims).

Disingenuous analysis (added 2009-05-20): Several reviewers have remarked positively on the book's equating of selective breeding with GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms). For intellectual honesty, the two are very different: Selective breeding involves tiny steps and having both nature and the breeder evaluate the desirability of each change. GMO involves huge steps--such as introducing animal genes into plants--and with huge quantities of new organisms produced all at once. Given how complex the real world is, testing is inherently very limited. Thus, there are legitimate concerns about unexpected behavior becoming apparent only after it is too late to undo (analogous to the effects of non-native animals and plants on an ecosystem).

Many issues debated today can be better understood by examining the history of food. For example, while many protest the production of genetically engineered food, this book shows how almost all the food we eat is genetically modified. Corn is not a wild type of plant but started as a grass that though centuries of human selection became corn. This books also gives insight to the debate over socialisms and shoes that some of the biggest famines in history where caused socialist programs.

I'm no history buff, so I can't discuss the criticisms of Standage's factual content. But when all is said and done, this is an enjoyable read that made me think about food, the food chain, food supply and food production--A LOT! I recommend it to anyone who is concerned about the global food supply, their own included. Yes, it is limited to covering primarily the West; yes, Standage rivals Carl Sagan in his sweeping generalizations and conclusions. But I think this is a great starting place to stimulate our interest in the subject and to motivate us to dig deeper. Who knew that the potato was considered fodder in France until someone staged a publicity stunt, with guards around the potato field, so the peasants would steal the potatoes when they were mature? Enjoy.

At first I thought this would be a boring "history" book, one that just rehashes everything I learned in school. Much to my shock and enjoyment it was a pretty good book. This book goes back to the very first humans and shows how food has shaped our future. From being hunter-gathers to present day humans it's amazing, and obvious, how food allowed us to make those important changes. Standage even gives some ideas on how food may shape our future.

There was so much information that while not necessarily useful, was at least interesting. I never really thought about the role that food had played in our history, but after reading this book I thought to myself, "How could I not have recognized that important link?" I think food isn't at the forefront of history because it is something that we take for granted. Even when learning of times when food was rationed by different countries throughout history I never realized the role that food played in the political and cultural climates.

The writing style was also nice. It wasn't mundane to read, the information was presented with a very nice flow. It wasn't an exciting book, and it wasn't one that I became captivated by, but it was enjoyable. If nothing else the knowledge I gained was worth the read.

It was very interesting and I would definitely recommend it.

I liked this one. I'm a big history buff, but do not specialize in the history of food in any way, shape, or form. So, though it may have been elementary for some readers, I thought it was just fine for less sophisticated ones like myself. ;^)

To me, it seemed like a cross between a good macro history like you might get with a Jared Diamond and a well-written, short, think piece like you might get with a Malcolm Gladwell. Lots of interesting ideas, connections, thought, and theories. I also found the writing well done.

No, it wasn't comprehensive, as some reviewers have pointed out. But I'm not sure why anyone would have gotten this book thinking it would be. I actually liked it as a more basic but wide-ranging alternative to monographs or in-depth, more scholarly tomes.

One thing that I did not like about this book was its conservative, free-market slant (the author writes for the Economist). It's not like he's a Rush Limbaugh at all, but if that's not your cup of tea, you may find it rather a distraction.

Forgive the pun, but this book isn't particularly satisfying. It isn't bad, but it isn't great either. Standage isn't really a historian, and this book is merely a repackaging of various scholars' works. Standage's main qualifications for writing this book is that he's read three books by Jared Diamond, but what armchair historian hasn't?

Not only does his methodology leave a bad taste in the mouth, but also his narrative is unpalatable (okay, so it's not that bad, but I couldn't resist more food puns). Standage commits the unforgivable sin in pop-history by being tedious. He sort of repeats himself, and frequently doesn't go anywhere with the narrative. What's more, he doesn't tell one story. He'll talk about domestication for a while, he'll talk about spices for a while, he'll talk about supply lines in war for a while. He doesn't write a narrative about food; he just gives a few unrelated episodes from various time periods and calls it a history.

You really have to be dedicated to finish it. It's just okay.

This book is like Michael Pollan on prozak. Like Pollan, Standage weaves a fascinating story that pulls our most basic daily craving into a rich fabric of history and culture. Unlike Pollan, he tells the story from the perspective of human circumstance and creativity in a way that celebrates history without blame or judgement. Throughout, Standage uses food to explain the big questions of history that I never thought to ask - Was agriculture good? Why did Britain industrialize first? Why did evolutionary theory come so late? - in a way that will continue to shift the questions I ask about history. I recommend this book to anyone who eats.