Review: An Edible History of Humanity
September 16th, 2009 9:43 pm by Shane
I love history books and I try to read/listen to as many as I can. In the last year or so, I've read two books about the Roman Empire, two about the Middle Ages, one about Charlemagne, one about Alexander the Great, and one about Augustus Caesar. It's not a huge number of books, and I wish I had more time: I mostly listen to books while I mow my lawn which can be measured in acres. Coming across this book, "An Edible History of Humanity" by Tom Standage, something about it clicked, and I gave it a listen and was rewarded with a really great book.
The first thing that a reader will notice in the first part of the book, is that Standage is somewhat critical of the concept of "organic" equaling natural. Almost immediately in the book, the author explains how not a single crop we eat today is natural. Cereal crops were all manipulated by man to produce better yields. The forerunner of maize, teosinte, is completely unrecognizable as a food. Tomatoes were yellow until Europeans bred them to be red. Carrots weren't originally orange: the orange color arose from the House of Orange in the 17th century and became popular in the west. Nothing we eat is "natural" anymore. It's all man-made. Now, mind you, Standage is not hostile to organic farming per se, but he wanted to dispel some of the mystique around it.
One other interesting thing I learned from the book, was the difficult transfer from hunter-gatherer cultures to agrarian cultures. It is true that hunter-gatherers lived short and brutish lives, however they seemed to have better nutrition that the initial agrarians. They were as tall as modern humans: around 5'9 for men and 5'4 for women. After transitioning to agrarian societies, ignorant of the concept of nutrition, those numbers dropped to 5'4 for men, and 5'0 for women. It's taken us nearly 7,000 years to get back to the same height as our early Holocene ancestors.
There were actually advantages to being a hunter-gatherer that I hadn't considered either. In some places, gathering food was much easier and less time consuming than farming. Families were smaller (anything that promotes less kids is a bonus in my book) because large families are hard to move around. Standage, by no means, advocates going back to hunter-gatherers, but simply illustrates that it hasn't been a direct line of progress over the last 10,000 years.
Standage mentions Thomas Malthus a lot, who two hundred years ago declared that the Earth would soon not be able to feed its population. At the time there were about a billion people worldwide. Obviously, Malthus was wrong and he was one in a long line of people who have predicted doom concerning population growth. Every time we've been able to figure out some way to produce more food on the same land increasing overall yield. This part made me a little uneasy, because, well, now that we have almost 7 billion people we have to be close to the limit, right? Well, while my gut says yes, most times in history I would be dead wrong, so I have to pause. Growth rates are slowing and some population models have us declining in the late 21st century.
Another interesting part of the book was the large section on the Middle Age spice trade. Spices we take for granted today, such as black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, and ginger were only known to Europeans in the finished form. No one had ever seen what unprocessed cinnamon looked like as late as 1492 when Christopher Columbus returned to Spain from his first voyage with some sort of bark he claimed was cinnamon but didn't really smell or taste like it. No one knew how to make it. A lot of the spices originated from small islands in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, imported into Europe through Arab traders. Remember my post about my oldest known ancestor Martin Vielhauer? When Martin was born, his family had no idea what cinnamon was made from, where nutmeg came from, or what it took to make black pepper. It wasn't until the mid 1600's and early 1700's that Europeans finally found the actual islands the spices came from. This desire for spices helped trigger the exploration of the Americas and European colonialism that forever changed history. All for food additives that few of us even think twice about. (As a side note, the book also highlighted the non-European world of commerce and trade, while not new to me, is not taught nearly enough).
The last section of the book I want to go over is the section on the "Green Revolution". This part of the book will also bother "organic" proponents, because Standage can come off somewhat cavalier about the use of ammonia based fertilizers and pesticides. The invention of both has had a huge impact on farming and our environment. Before the invention of mass produced ammonia based fertilizers farmers relied on animal manure and legume type crops to reintroduce nitrogen into the soil. Both methods were improvements from ancient times, but still very inefficient.
In the early 1900's, the Haber-Bosch process was developed which brought on the age of chemical fertilizers and the world hasn't been the same since. It's fair to say we would have starved without this process. Also, important to the "Green Revolution" was the development of new cereal crops the by the late great Norman Borlaug. He practically single handedly changed the way the world is fed, and he won a Nobel Prize for it. This post cannot do him justice, and since he recently passed away (September 12, 2009), there happens to be a lot of information about him in the news, so check it out. Reading about him is somewhat awe inspiring, to think that a single man could have such an impact on the food supply of the world. There is some controversy surrounding him and the concept of cross-breeding, but his effect on the world cannot be denied.
At the end of the book, Standage talks more about "organic" farming, and while parts of the book could seem hostile to proponents, in the end he wraps it up by positing that the future really lies in the combination of the industrialization of modern agriculture and the environmental concerns of the "organic" movement. There already has been some cross over, and I don't mean in terms of big agriculture companies running "organic" farms. Methods like "no-till" farming are something that could be catching on. Seed companies are working on plants that require less fertilizer and pesticides, not to mention significant changes in how crops are watered.
I'm not sure that everyone will see the book the same as I did: some reviews on Amazon.com were down right harsh. However, I have to say that I think Tom Standage did his best to present the facts as unbiased as he could. I don't know his personal opinions on "organic" farming, but I really think he was pretty balanced in this book. If you're fan of food, or just like history in general, I think you'll like this book.
