This book begins with a description of hunter/gatherer societies and the human interactions that were typical in this sort of structure. Then it moves on to cultivation of grains and the creation of farm-based cultures. Soon, we have societies that travel to obtain more desirable goods from foreign lands. And finally, we have the struggles of the modern day societies to feed their entire populations. There are, of course, extensive historical examples and anecdotes to illustrate the progression of humankind and its relationship with food.

To be honest, I read about the first fifty pages of the book and then skimmed the rest. It just wasn't the right book choice to get my mind off of this sweltering summer heat. I will definitely hang on to it though and finish it at another time. It's obvious that Standage did comprehensive research and he does a good job of giving a global perspective with examples from many different cultures. I would say that if you have taken any anthropology courses or if you watch the History Channel, you have already probably been exposed to the concepts that he presents in this book. There didn't seem to be any revolutionary ideas here but it's interesting nonetheless and deserves a look if you're interested in this topic.

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In this highly informative and interesting book, Tom Standage chronicles the evolution of food, explaining how humanity's first meals were hunted and gathered by people who literally lived off the land and how a shift towards farming and a development of agriculture prompted the first civilizations to be built. As people and cultures evolved, so did food's place in society, and as Standgae relates, food became, by turns, a power to exploit, a wealth to hoard, and a very special focus of politics. From the spice trade to the special cultivation of seeds that will miraculously survive disease and drought, Standage gives us the history of food as it relates to the history of people, societies, and governments in an engaging and interesting buffet that will delight and titillate even the most quaint appetite.

The sheer amount of information in this book was very impressive. Standgae has a way of making all of these minute bits of information not only interesting, but important. Far from being a weighty and dry tome, this book had me involved and curious from the very first pages. The information provided is obscure yet relevant in today's society, where it seems that everything of consequence is minutely examined; after reading this book, I came to see that food is of much greater consequence then I had previously thought.

I really enjoyed the sections that dealt with the propagation of special seeds that were basically engineered to maximize the growth and nutritional output of the various crops. Standage explains how just a small strip of a plant called teosinte was eventually bred into the corn that we now find in the supermarket, and how wheat was altered to be shorter, stronger and more easily harvested. Other chapters dealt with how transporting food across the ocean actually made great strides in spreading Islam beyond it's traditional boundaries, and how the rise of industrialization both in food production and in other sectors changed our history, particularly in Europe.

I was constantly amazed by this book because the information was so varied and there was so much more than just food encapsulated within these pages. From the topic of food logistics during war to a special section called "Food As a Weapon," Standage imparts his wisdom like a particularly friendly and engaging professor. I found the book to be very conversational, and though the information presented was academic most of the time, I didn't feel that the author was making his explanations impenetrable with concepts or topics that the average reader could not understand. I don't even think that one needs to have a background in history to appreciate or understand this book because Standage does a great job of filling in the gaps about what was going on in the various sectors of the world during the time frames he is examining.

This book doesn't really talk about food a a gustatory experience: you won't find recipes or tales of exotic meals. What you will find is the progression of food from an object of sustenance to an object of power, and onwards towards its scientific manipulation and use as a precursor of both population explosion and decline. You will find out why the Aztecs began to sacrifice food to their gods in favor of people, and why a small chemical reaction dramatically changed the way food was grown. You will find out how food was preserved throughout history (one of my favorite sections, I have to say), and how food had direct responsibility for the slave trade. This book provides the answers and explanations for many of the food questions that you may have never even thought about, and gives an accurate and flavorful account of just how and why things end up on our plate.

I am not normally a reader of non-fiction, and although this book wasn't exactly what I expected, I found it totally absorbing. Once again, I followed my husband about the house reading quotes and passages to him, which is something I only do when a book has me completely hooked. I liked the fact that the author was very direct and didn't meander, and that all his facts were so relevant towards today's food-conscious mindset. I think that this would be a great read for anyone who has even a modicum of curiosity about food, or if you are fond of non-fiction that is extremely well written. An excellent book that I am sure will enable some excellent conversations. Highly recommended. ( )

I want to say that this book is the history of civilization’s relationship with food. (Short summary: We need it, so we get it, or we die.) But what Tom Standage writes is a little more complicated than that. It is more a story about food’s influence over societies, and how the quest to control its availability led humanity to form agricultural civilizations, explore the world, and transform societies again and again.

Sometimes we transform food; sometimes it changes us. The cultivation and careful tending of maize in the Americas led to a plant that is unable to reproduce without human assistance. The Europeans’ taste for the exotic flavor of spices encouraged trade and eventually led to colonization in Asia and the Americas, which uprooted the lives of people around the world. The industrialization of food production helped fuel the massive population growth of the nineteenth and twentieth century.

It’s an interesting read for sure. Sometimes Standage would flesh out ideas I already had. For example, I knew that one of the reasons Napoleon failed to take Russia was that the Russians destroyed crops and food stores so that his armies had no supplies the deeper they got into the country. But the book provided several other examples of armies using food to win or lose battles, including Alexander the Great, the American Revolution and the World Wars.

One area the author didn’t really cover, which disappointed me, was the sustainability of industrialized food, and the effect industrialization has had on food quality. Maybe he felt he didn’t need to because that would be projecting into the future, rather than looking back into history. Maybe he felt there were already plenty of books on that topic, since it’s become quite a popular one in the last few years. He talked at length about the effect of chemical fertilizers on soil productivity, but not much about its effects the ecosystem and environment of the areas around the farm. The book seemed to end rather suddenly, and I think this was largely because he made very little speculation about the future of food’s influence. My questions about food didn’t feel fully answered.

I found An Edible History of Humanity to be entertaining and a perspective to history not often visited. Usually it takes me a while to read non-fiction books, but I got through this one in about a week. That’s fast for me, especially considering it was the week before finals and I had a lot of other school-related reading to do! ( )

Summary: In An Edible History of Humanity, Tom Standage looks at how food - its acquisition, distribution, and use - has shaped the course of our civilization's history. On the one hand, food's role in history might seem obvious; because, of course, every action made by every person who fills every history book was fueled by food. But on the other hand, innovations in food technology - for instance, the adoption of agriculture, the desire for exotic spices from faraway lands, the process of preserving food by canning, or the invention of chemical fertilizers - have had far-reaching (and often surprising) effects on the path that our culture has traveled.

Review: I suspected, when I requested this book, that it had about a 40% chance of annoying me. I feared, when I received it, checked the "Sources" list at the back, and saw nary a mention of Daniel Quinn, that it had a 95% chance of frustrating the heck out of me. And, when, after twenty five pages, I'd nearly filled the slip of paper that I was using as a bookmark with notes-to-self complete with multiple overly-emphatic exclamation points, I knew that it was probably going to continue to be problematic for the next 250 pages.

(A side note about Daniel Quinn: Even though he's one of my absolute favorite authors, I don't talk much about his books, because when I do, I've noticed that people have a tendency to start looking at me like I just asked them to shave their eyebrows and join my nifty new cult. Suffice it to say, his novels - particularly The Story of B - are the books that have most influenced the way I think about humanity, and about our place in the world. They also have some very astute things to say about a) early history and the adoption of agriculture, and b) overpopulation, and it's impossible for me to read a book that deals as intimately with these topics as An Edible History of Humanity does and not compare the two.)

Let me see if I can sum up my issues with this book. Tom Standage is clearly an intelligent and well-informed guy who did a lot of research for this book. My frustration comes from the fact that although he's got his facts right, his conclusions so frequently seem to be off base.

To put it another way: Standage needs to spend less time hanging around with economists, and more time hanging around with ecologists. There is one glaring omission that bothered me throughout his book, and that is that he doesn't seem to get the fundamental connection between food production and population growth. To quote from Daniel Quinn's Ishmael (which is in turn quoting from Peter Farb's Humankind): "Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population." Or, to put it into an ecologist's terms, increasing the carrying capacity of an environment will lead to a proportional increase in population.

I would bet that Tom Standage knows this. What he doesn't seem to believe, however, is that it applies to humans just as much as it applies to lynxes and snowshoe hares. If there is more food available, there will soon be more individuals around to eat it. Full stop. This is a law of ecology in the same way that gravity is a law of physics, and humans don't get an exemption to this law just because we're so darn clever - and that's the part of the equation that's missing from Standage's reasoning.

To give a concrete example from the book:

"With hindsight, of course, we can appreciate the irony that Malthus pointed out the biological constrains on population and economic growth [i.e. that population has the power to grow exponentially while food production can only grow arithmetically, leading a population to soon outstrip its power to feed itself] just at the moment when Britain was about to demonstrate, for the first time in human history, that they no longer applied.
...
Yet Britain did not hit the ecological wall that Malthus anticipated. Instead, it vaulted over it and broke free of the constraints of the "biological old regime" in which everything was derived from the produce of the land. Rather than growing most of its own food, Britain concentrated on manufacturing industrial goods, notably cotton textiles, which could then be traded for food from overseas. During the nineteenth century the population more than tripled, but the economy grew faster still, so that the average standard of living increased - an outcome that would have astonished Malthus."

See what I mean? Right facts, wrong conclusions, and humans somehow exempting themselves from the laws of biology. The nineteenth century British didn't defy the laws of ecology for the same reason that lining up a bunch of paperclips doesn't violate the second law of thermodynamics: neither is a closed system. By importing food, the British effectively increased the carrying capacity of their environment, and their population responded exactly as the laws of ecology predict.

Similarly, Standage doesn't seem to believe that overpopulation is a problem. He believes that as industrialization occurs, food production can go up while the population simultaneously goes down. And maybe I am not well enough versed in the economic theory of demographic transition, but to me, this sounds fantastically implausible. Even if it's true, I think the human population is already over the global sustainable carrying capacity, and that there simply aren't enough natural resources to maintain seven billion of us indefinitely, especially at a rate of consumption equal to that of current industrialized nations.

There are other, smaller problems I had with other parts of the book - a tendency towards over-generalization, for one. Most of his statements about the hunter-gatherer lifestyle seem based on a single ethnography (Richard Lee's seminal work on the !Kung), ignoring the broad diversity in social structuring that can be found in other tribal peoples. He also makes the occasional statement like "...man's inherent tendencies toward hierarchical organization (clearly visible in apes and many other animal species)..." that are at best based on selective use of the evidence, and at worst totally wrong. And I could write a whole separate essay about his interpretations of the adoption of early agriculture and the beginnings of "civilization", but this is already getting long.

To be fair, there were parts of the book that I quite enjoyed. Everything from about 400 BCE to about 1800 CE was fine - the section on how the spice trade drove exploration and shaped the modern world was a fascinating look at history, and was full of interesting facts. For instance, did you know that under the original definition of "spice" (etymologically related to "species", or "kinds"), tigers counted as a spice? (Spices were things on a list of luxury items that were subject to a heavy import tax in the Roman Empire.) Similarly, his look at how the problem of provisioning troops during wartime shaped the outcome of most major world conflicts was also interesting and well done.

Ultimately, though, I have to look at this book from a biologist's point of view, and on that scale, it was a disappointment. It's an interesting (and relevant!) way to look at history, and there's plenty of good information here, but I don't agree with many of Standage's conclusions, and hate to think that his opinions will be taken as fact by many readers of this book. 2.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Fans of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel or Michael Pollan's books will probably find this book interesting, as will anyone with a general interest in anthropology, economics, or history writ large. Just promise me you won't read this one until you've picked up Daniel Quinn's A Story of B first, okay? ( )