Here’s an oddity: a history of food from the beginning of time to the present day that barely mentions meals. Leafing through the index throws up some other surprising omissions, including Bread, Restaurants, Cutlery, Vegetarians and Chocolate. Oh, and Cooking and Cooks (though Cookbooks do feature once, on page 73).

So what does Tom Standage, the business editor of The Economist, consider worthy of inclusion in an “edible history of humanity”? The answer is the vast forces of population, war, industry, empire, social structure and, above all, agriculture and genetic engineering. “Domesticated plants and animals,” he writes, “form the very foundations of the modern world.”

The invention of farming, in Standage’s view, may have been the biggest mistake human beings ever made. “Quite why humans switched from hunting and gathering to farming is one of the oldest, most complex, and most important questions in human history.” Hunter-gatherers have lots of advantages over farmers. Judging from archeological evidence, they were taller and better fed and did not generally suffer tooth decay, ­rickets and scurvy, as early farmers did. Their diet — of fruits, nuts and meat — was far more varied than the dreary cereal of the farmers; and they only had to work a two-day week to get it. Being a hunter-gatherer (the odd bit of infanticide and cannibalism aside) was “fun”. Yet bit by bit we learnt to plant seeds and ­settle down. And by the time anyone noticed the drawbacks, the old wild foods had been driven out, at which point farming had stopped being “optional” and had become “compulsory” for survival.

It is Standage’s provocative thesis that farming is a “profoundly unnatural” activity and one that has done “more to change the world” than “any other human activity”. His excitingly grand longue durée history is an effective way of making many of our current obsessions seem petty. Most of the imp­ortant decisions about food were made thousands of years ago, in Standage’s view, and most of our food is the result of “selective breeding” and “genetic engineering”.

Adopting this position enables him to make eye-catching rhetorical points. Local-food advocates, he suggests, should be mindful of the “rich history of the spice trade”, which depended on transporting goods halfway round the world. Anti-GM campaigners should remember that “even orange carrots are man-made”, bred for their colour. Standage challenges any notion that there is such a thing as “natural” food. Take corn. A golden ear of maize appears a “gift from nature”, but Standage shows that it is actually the result of thousands of deliberate human decisions, from the foragers who first thought to gather and store wild maize seeds, to the farmers who gradually bred a cob that was easy to eat, to the Aztecs and Mayas who rendered it nutritionally complete by treating it with ­calcium hydroxide, liberating the protein and vitamins and making it fit to eat.

Standage’s lofty geopolitical perspective makes a welcome change from the kind of food histories we used to get (and sometimes still do), in which the rich concoctions of a few court cookbooks are used as evidence for what the people at large ate. In the great scheme of things, he is right to focus more on famine than on silver spoons. He writes powerfully about the disastrous agricultural policies of Mao and Stalin, which exemplify his argument that food is a “weapon”. A Soviet-era joke is quoted: “How do you deal with mice in the Kremlin? Put up a sign saying ‘collective farm’. Then half the mice will starve, and the other half will run away.”

This is a clever book. It shows how many hidden forces are at work — political, social, economic — when you sit down for dinner. What it doesn’t show is that eating is one of life’s great pleasures. Standage seems curiously closed off from the world of real human experience. His banal and punning conclusion is that “food is certain to be a vital ingredient of humanity’s future”. If something is missing here, it is passion. This is an edible history that tells us a great deal about why we eat what we do, but almost nothing about what eating means for the people who do it.

An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage
Atlantic £19.99 pp283

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