Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 1 (2010), p. 139

For reasons that are beyond me (though feminist suggestions deserve attention), the classier classes of society do not rank food as really classy. Ask college graduates to name the greatest of our species and they will rattle on for a long time before naming a cook. Our college graduates need two or three days of fasting to complete their educations.

Absent that solution, they should read Kenneth Kiple’s new book. Its cover may mislead the prospective reader into thinking it just another cookbook, a collection of recipes, but that is not so; it is a scholarly study of 10,000 years of the gathering, cultivation, breeding, preparation, and consumption of food. It utilizes hundreds of sources, primary and secondary, including cookbooks, yes, but also memoirs of philosophers, graph-laden texts on economics, or articles on malnutrition in medical journals. And (a bonus we can not always count on), it reads well.

The best reference book on the history of food remains The Cambridge world history of food, the two-volume tome that Professor Kiple and Kriemhild Conee heaped together in the 1990s, but its 2000 pages of articles, most of them excellent, do not form a cogent whole. Every library should have a copy, but I cannot imagine anyone reading all the way through it. Professor Kiple, fortunately for us, by editing and presiding over its seismic formation, prepared himself to write the cogent book that is the subject of this review.

A movable feast begins with the last hunters and first farmers. Why did they make what remains our species’ most radical revolution, the switch to agriculture, which involved the transformation of a small population of healthy hunters and gatherers into dense populations of usually under-fed and poorly-fed peasant subjects of empires we call Roman, Chinese, Aztec, the USA, NATO, and so on? Kiple combines this inquiry with what we know about the origins of our basic crops – notably rice, wheat, and maize – and animals – dogs, cattle, and horses – and how their domestication altered, sometimes positively and often not, whole societies and ecosystems. Our author similarly honours the origins and spread of the substances of our addictions – such as sugar, coffee, tea, or alcohol – too.

Kiple’s follows this with a multi-chapter inquiry entitled ‘The Columbian Exchange’, i.e. the agricultural revolution triggered by the exchange of organisms between the Old and New Worlds starting in 1492. For instance, wheat, a Middle Eastern grass, and horses, a Eurasian animal, became standard organisms on the Great Plains, the Pampa, and the Outback. (I might mention here that the name, ‘the Columbian Exchange’, is my invention, the title of a book I wrote a generation ago, and I wish that Professor Kiple and the others that rattle it off so often would acknowledge this).

The last half of A movable feast, for me not so interesting as the first half, is devoted to more narrowly modern and often more commercial matters such as the development of regional diets, specifically North American with its Hispanic, Italian and other imported features, and to other globalization trends. Human diets from one side of the world to the other are getting more and more alike. Kiple also considers other modern characteristics – restaurants, supermarkets, frozen foods, fast foods. He also includes a good deal about infections transmitted by food, such as cholera, and diseases of deprivation such as pellagra and that strangest of all our food curses, obesity. He leaves us treading water (or more usually coca cola) in the twenty-first century. Globalization leaves many of our number still poor and starving and others, those of the richer societies, attaining globalization individually.

We are headed for at least a colossal nine to ten billion: feeding ourselves won’t be easy. We will have to deal with that problem in an informed and sophisticated fashion. A good first step would be to read Kenneth Kiple’s A movable feast.