An Edible History of Humanity Paperback – Illustrated, 27 April 2010

This book gives a fascinating account of the key role food has played in our history. As well as the more obvious changes like the move from hunter gatherer to farmer, the description of, for example, how the spice trade encouraged exploration of the new world, is covered in great depth. It is extremely well written - if like me you were turned off history at school because it seemed very dry, this is an excellent take on the subject with masses of human interest stories to keep you turning the pages. Highly recommended.

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What did I buy this product for? Because it came recommended as a book to read. It's in reasonably good condition and I am happy with the purchase. It's an interesting read! It says potatoes and sugar helped fuel the industrial revolution!

If you think history is just a bunch of dates and dead people, think again. Tom Standage takes you on a wild ride through time, showing how what we eat has literally shaped the world. From the first farmers who decided that staying put and growing crops was better than chasing mammoths, to the spice trade that had Europeans sailing off the edge of the world, food is the unsung hero of human progress. Standage serves up a feast of fascinating facts, like how the potato fueled the Industrial Revolution and how communism’s food policies led to some of the worst famines in history. It’s like learning history through your stomach—deliciously enlightening and surprisingly relevant to today’s global food challenges. Just don’t read it on an empty stomach; you might get hungry for more than just knowledge.

An Edible History of Humanity is a jog through the ways in which the technologies of food production have influenced history. Examples from many periods are covered: the move from hunting and gathering to agriculture; the spice trade; the influence of food on military history (from Napoleon to the Cold War); the green revolution of the sixties and seventies; the great famines of Stalin and Mao.It was something of a disappointment after Standage's outstanding earlier books The Neptune File (on planetary discovery) and The Victorian Internet (the history of the telegraph). Part of the problem is that, unlike these earlier works, there is no real narrative - just a sequence of examples. So the book lacks a sense of overall organisation or structure.Also the material just seems on average duller than the earlier books. There are some interesting details (for example the discovery of synthetic nitrogen by Haber) but also a good deal of fairly pedestrian stuff about the various episodes in the spice trade.There is a tendency towards the statement of the obvious. As the Times review pointed out, the book's conclusion that "food is certain to be a vital ingredient of humanity's future" is banal. Also, when Standage points out that tin cans are "still in use today" I wondered to whom exactly this might come as news.

Historical facts combined with good writing - what can be a better read! Strongly recommend if you are into enhancing books.

Why were Indian eunuchs classed as spices in fifth century Alexandria when black pepper wasn’t?Why were seventeenth century Japanese samurai beheading tribal leaders in the Banda Islands for the Dutch?Why did bird droppings turn nineteenth century Bolivia into a landlocked country?These are just some of the quirkier issues addressed in the impressive book, the side dishes if you like at a substantial and nourishing meal.Standage’s book is neither a history of cuisine nor a scholarly work but rather a history of food supply from the roots of agriculture to the present day aimed at the general reader.The book is divided into 6 sections.1. The Edible Foundations of Civilization. This covers the origins of agriculture.2. Food and Social Structure. This covers the social structures that arise as social units become bigger, more complex and more unequal.3. Global Highways of Food. This covers the importance of the spice trade in encouraging exploration and thereafter imperial expansion.4. Food, Energy and Industrialization. This covers the Columbian Exchange and how it helped fuel the Industrial Revolution.5. Food as a Weapon. This covers not only feeding armies and the invention of canned food but the Berlin Airlift and the famines produced by the policies of Stalin and Mao. (While Mao’s famine was the worst in history it was the product of his barmy belief in what communism could achieve; Stalin’s famine was deliberate). Standage makes the point that others have made before that where you have both a democracy and a free press famines don’t tend to happen.The importance of the weaknesses in Soviet food production in the eventualcollapse of the Soviet Union I had underestimated until I read this book.6. Food, Population and Development. I wonder in how many histories of the world and/or of the 20th century do Fritz Haber and/or Norman Borlaug get a mention? Yet were it not for the work of these men the world would be a very, very, very different place. Here they get their due.The book ends with a review of the present and with a look to the futurewithout wandering into the author’s politics or fanciful speculations.While I liked this book there are some thoughtful negative reviews on Amazon.com giving alternative opinions.

The title perfectly explains its content, if you want to discover the history of humanity under a pervespective rarely told, this is the book for you. Tom Standage also wrote "A History of the World in Six Glasses", worth reading too.