Chronicles a 12,000-year history of the role of food in societies and people's everyday lives--arguing that food crises are cyclical, and that we may be in one now--and offers a view of what the future may hold.
Chronicles the role of food in history and people's everyday lives--arguing that food crises are cyclical, and that one may be happening now--and offers a view of what the future may hold.
"A panoramic overview...plenty of enlightening stories...Spanning the whole of human civilization, this is a compelling read."---Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"With a flavor of Jared Diamond, Empires of Food thoughtfully weaves religion, military history, and science into a historical arc of how food undergirds civilizations' rise and fall. Sprinkling discussions of monks and bird guano in with the Roman Empire and colonization, the book elucidates the inherent instability of how our current food infrastructure has evolved and will make you rethink how you eat."---Jennifer 8. Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles
"Evan Fraser and Andrew Rimas vividly recreate centuries of spice-filled ships and grain silos to show that, while the pen and the gun may be the visible tools of diplomacy, the knife and fork are often the true instruments of human change. Their unsentimental march through our history and into the future reaches a conclusion that is both inspiring and unnerving: civilization is what we eat."---Sasha Issenberg, author of The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy
"This isn't just first-class scholarship, it's energetic writing. Fraser and Rimas have a knack for the little detail that unveils the big thought. Empires of Food is a must-read for anyone who wants to know why every night a billion people go to bed obese and another billion go to bed hungry."---George Alagiah, author of A Passage to Africa and A Homefrom Home
"In offering a compelling portrait of the interplay between imperial expansion and food systems across the millennia, Empires of Food lays before us the fragility of a twenty-first-century food system beset by climate change, rising fuel costs, and a shrinking agricultural frontier and wonders whether, like the empires of the past, we will sustain a delusion of superabundance as we careen toward a world of famine and insecurity, or whether we will find the wisdom and the means to avert catastrophe."---Raymond C. Offenheiser, President, Oxfam America
We are what we eat: this aphorism contains a profound truth about civilization, one that has played out on the world historical stage over many millennia of human endeavor.
Using the colorful diaries of a sixteenth-century merchant as a narrative guide, Empires of Food vividly chronicles the fate of people and societies for the past twelve thousand years through the foods they grew, hunted, traded, and ate---and gives us fascinating, and devastating, insights into what to expect in years to come. In energetic prose, agricultural expert Evan D. G. Fraser and journalist Andrew Rimas tell gripping stories that capture the flavor of places as disparate as ancient Mesopotamia and imperial Britain, taking us from the first city in the once-thriving Fertile Crescent to today's overworked breadbaskets and rice bowls in the United States and China, showing just what food has meant to humanity.
Cities, culture, art, government, and religion are founded on the creation and exchange of food surpluses, complex societies built by shipping corn and wheat and rice up rivers and into the stewpots of history's generations. But eventually, inevitably, the crops fail, the fields erode, or the temperature drops, and the center of power shifts. Cultures descend into dark ages of poverty, famine, and war. It happened at the end of the Roman Empire, when slave plantations overworked Europe's and Egypt's soil and drained its vigor. It happened to die Mayans, who abandoned their great cities during centuries of drought. It happened in the fourteenth century, when medieval societies crashed in famine and plague, and again in the nineteenth century, when catastrophic colonial schemes plunged half the world into a poverty from which it has never recovered. And today, even though we live in an age of astounding agricultural productivity, and genetically modified crops, our food supplies are once again in peril.
Empires of Food brilliantly recounts the history of cyclic consumption, but it is also the story of the future; of, for example, how a shrimp boat hauling up an empty net in the Mekong Delta could spark a riot in the Caribbean. It tells what happens when a culture or nation runs out of food---and shows us the face of the world turned hungry. The authors argue that neither local food movements nor free market economists will stave off the next crash, and they propose their own solutions. A fascinating, fresh history told through die prism of the dining table, Empires of Food offers a grand scope and a provocative analysis of the world today, indispensable in this time of global warming and food crises.
How food determines the fate of human societies—a Guns, Germs, and Steel of food, particularly urgent in a time of global food crisis.
