Tom Standage's An Edible History Of Humanity

From 1879 to 1883 Chile, Bolivia, and Peru fought the War of the Pacific. By the end of the war over 50,000 people had been killed injured. The aim of the states involved was to take possession of terrain that contained reserves of sodium nitrate. If that sounds like an insane reason to wage war, Tom Standage's work “An Edible History of Humanity” focuses on how food has impacted human history and culture. For those who rarely think about food except when purchasing or eating it, An Edible History of Humanity offers revelation after revelation about its too-often-taken-for-granted subject. Standage, a British writer who is also the business editor of the Economist, says in his introduction: "Throughout history, food has done more than simply
The first circumnavigation of the globe, executed by a Spanish flotilla initially under the command of the Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan, was prompted by a search for spices. One of the most provocative parts of An Edible History is its scrutiny of the relationship between food production and the commencement of the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth century England. A combination of factors in that time and place-scientific innovation, and relatively new agricultural methods such as crop rotation, to cite just two-enabled fewer farmers to grow more food on less land. This in turn impelled many denizens of rural areas to seek work at manufacturing concerns and allowed for the mining of the plentiful coal deposits of Northern England. Standage makes a cleverly persuasive case that the composition and evolution of the Industrial Revolution were shaped by comestibles. I confess to never having given any thought to ammonia before reading this book, but apparently it was feckless of me not to have done so: Standage maintains that its synthesis as a liquid from hydrogen and nitrogen in Germany in 1909 "Marked the technological breakthrough that was to have arguably the greatest impact on mankind during the twentieth