"An Edible History of Humanity"
Tom Standage
This book is a sort of continuation, or a variation on a theme if you like, of his previous book "A History of the World in 6 Glasses." In that book, which I read very recently, different drinks were tied to historical events and trends in an enlightening and fascinating way. This book, though similar in its unusual choice of lens through which to view history, is much more far-ranging as well as less concise and focused.
Standage covers a very broad table of food-related inquiries, beginning with Neolithic man, hunter-gatherers, and the formation of agriculture, and ending with the man-caused famines of the Soviet Union and Maoist China, and the benefits and pitfalls that accompany the Green Revolution in the 20th and 21st centuries. Between them, he looks at how food was a central factor in the exploration of the world by Europeans, how that exploration led to colonialism as well as initiated worldwide trade, how food, related to fuel both as a mechanical as well as a biochemical power supply, was an indispensable part of the Industrial Revolution, which changed (and is still changing) the world, and how food is related to current trends in world population, war, and humanity's future.
It is superbly written, though, as I mentioned before, it encompasses such a large subject that Standage occasionally gets lost in words, names, and interrelated ideas. A section on the chemistry of food in particular was taxing to get through. Overall, a pretty good read, especially if you are interested in the economic and societal evolution of foodstuffs.
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