The three most important plants of prehistory were wheat, rice and maize (corn). Over the centuries, humans selected better and better varieties so that today's plants are not similar to the originals. Wheat was important for the civilizations of the Middle East; rice for the Far East; and corn for the Americas.

Standage makes a very good point: that the transition from hunting-gathering to growing these plants makes little sense. The diet of the hunter-gatherer was more varied and more nutritional. Farming produces more food per unit of land but farming produces less per hour of labor. And farmers suffered from diseases that were mostly unknown to hunter-gatherers. In other words, farmers had to work more, were less well fed and were less healthy than the hunter gatherers. So it is a mystery why the agricultural civilizations formed, especially in places where there was abundance of animals, fruit and vegetables. The mystery is not easily solved, but it is certain that by 2,000 BC most of humankind had switched to farming. The linguistic evidence is that farmers invaded areas of nonfarmers: presumably farmers imported not only their agriculture but also their language, and linguistic analysis shows that most people alive today speak languages that derived from just a few.

The other big difference between hunter-gatherers and farmers is that the societies of hunter-gatherers were egalitarian whereas farmers created surplus and greed, leading to social stratification: not eveybody farmed, but some controlled the surplus of food.

Before the invention of money, people bartered food. And people paid taxes in the form of food and of agricultural labor to grow food. The funny thing is that people were supposed to give food also to gods and to ancestors (dead people) even though it was self-evident that neither gods nor dead people ate the food.

Standage then moves on to spices. He doesn't believe that spices became popular as an efficient way to mask the taste of rotten meat but doesn't offer an alternative explanation (i still think it was because of the rotten meat). Looking for spices, humans spread ideas and inventions. Standage highlights the importance that the trade routes, originally created to trade food, had for the spread of ideas between Europe and Asia. He mentions the "Periplus of the Erythraean Sea" that is one of the most fascinating documents of the Roman age (written in Greek by a trader or geographer who details all Graeco-Roman commercial activities in southern Asia and eastern Africa). And of course diseases also traveled those routes: the Black Death is the most famous case.

Spices were also the motivation to invent a way to reach the Indies which indirectly led to the discovery of America. When the Muslims seized Byzantium, the entire trade with the Indies became a Muslim monopoly, so Portugal and Spain got the motivation to find sea routes to the Indies. Hence Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan, etc.

Standage summarizes the history of the Portuguese and Dutch empires and the horrible ways they conquered the "Indies". He also provides an overview of the slave trade (the full cycle: Europeans trading African slaves with textiles, sending the slaves to America to grow sugar, selling the sugar in Europe) and points out that growing sugar was an early industrial revolution because the production of sugar required division of labor and machinery.

Then Standage talks about the importance of the new crops imported into Europe from the Americas, notably maize and the potato, which contributed to the population explosion of Europe.

The population boom of the 18th century in Europe resulted in an expansion of farming, i.e. increased deforestation, which made wood too expensive for heating. Hence the British turned to coal, which was abundant and much cheaper. Instead of using today's sunlight to grow trees to use as fuel, the coal societies used the dead and buried products of millions of years of sunlight: coal. Coal was cheap and efficient enough that it also improved the productions of glass, dye, iron and steel. The steam engine was invented for coal mines, and was propelled by coal (that was basically free in coal mines). Despite the expanding agriculture, England still needed to import food from overseas, notably wheat from Ireland but also various crops from America. The trick was to pay with manufactured goods that didn't require huge land for food that required huge land, thereby offsourcing to other places the requirement to make a lot of land available to agriculture. Ireland, which was not as rich as England, depended on potatoes. Malthus had predicted that it was a bad policy to rely on potatoes. When finally an American disease reached Ireland, it destroyed the entire potato crop of 1845, causing famine. One million people died of starvation and another million emigrated. The famine forced the English government to abolish (in 1846) the Corn Laws that limited imports of food and made imported food more expensive. At the same time the USA had a surplus of wheat on the East Coast due to the railway that was bringing it from the Great Plains. Britain became dependent on American wheat.

A chapter is devoted to the importance of food in wars. Alexander and Napoleon are credited with being a smart organizer of logistics before being great battle strategists. They had agile armies that were efficiently resupplied. However, Napoleon failed miserably in Russia and in 1812 only 25,000 of the 450,000 soldiers sent to Russia came back to France despite the fact that Russia had not won a single battle.

Can food was invented by Nicolas Appert in France (who described the technique in his book "The Art of Preserving all Kinds of Animal and Vegetable Substances for Several Years" of 1810) but patented in 1810 by Peter Durand in England. The difference between the two is that Appert preferred glass jars whereas in England the tin can became more popular (lighter and it doesn't break). In 1813 Bryan Donkin, John Hall and John Gamble set up the world's first canning factory. Canned food became popular because of wars (easy to carry by soldiers in the Crimean War and in the Civil War of the USA) and because of diseases that hurt the food markets like the cattle diseases of the 1860s in England. The USA was the first country to massively switch to canned food, probably a side effect of the Civil War.

He is stretching his story a little bit when he gets to the Cold War and the famines caused by communism, but, all in all, this is a great book about the obvious importance of food in civilizations. More details about the ancient diets of Romans, Greeks, Mongols, etc would have been welcome, but i guess space was limited.

TM, ®, Copyright © 2020 Piero Scaruffi