NEVER mind the contradictions, you can buy books proving that curry, oranges, salt or beef each single-handedly made our world modern. There is a certain appeal in this: you are aware codfish or whatever didn鈥檛 really transform the universe by itself, but part of the fun is being taken in by the audacious cleverness of tying all of history to one foodstuff.
could have written a similar 鈥渘oun鈥� book. A few, in fact, since he highlights a dozen foods and spices with outsize personalities. But instead of casting backwards for one thread to stitch everything together, Standage sensibly casts a net, writing not a history of any one food but a history through food. Using this approach he demonstrates how changes in food production, technology and consumption have dragged humanity forwards from its hunter-gatherer days.
Then again, 鈥渇orwards鈥� isn鈥檛 the right word. Standage presents evidence that farming ruined human happiness, and plausibly traces the origins of social stratification, the West Indian slave trade and the bubonic plague to 鈥渁dvances鈥� in food production. Perhaps it is good, then, that he also plots a second, implicit history of humans using science to liberate themselves from the toil of scraping food from the land 鈥� the truest material sign of our modern world.
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The emphasis on food as a cultural catalyst differentiates Standage from Michael Pollan, whose plants鈥� eye view of the world keeps the consumables central. With Standage it is not what changes in food that matters, but rather what food changes. And it鈥檚 not just one food lifting and guiding history, but what Adam Smith might have called the 鈥渋nvisible fork鈥� of food economics.
Walker/Atlantic Books
