Food: A Very Short Introduction by John R. Krebs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This volume in the Oxford University Press AVSI series examines human eating habits. The first chapter puts the human diet in the context of evolution, reflecting upon how we got where we did in terms of food consumption. Here one gains insight into where the Paleo-diet fad is flawed, and one learns how cooking had a huge influence on human evolution.
The second chapter delves into the issue of likes and dislikes in food. We see that there are species-wide commonalities, but there are also differences both at an individual and cultural group level. e.g. Why is spice so common in the tropics and so rare in the great white north?
The third chapter looks at the ways food can do us in and what we've done - besides [and including] the aforementioned cooking - to reduce the threat of food gone awry. The penultimate chapter examines nutrition and how we get what we need from food.
The last chapter takes a bit of a turn, but investigates the fascinating topic of how (and whether) we will continue to feed our species. Readers will likely remember the name Malthus from either history or economics classes. He was an economist who suggested humanity was in dire straits, vis-à-vis food. Malthus noticed that population was growing geometrically while agricultural output grew arithmetically, and he reasonably noted that this was unsustainable. Of course, Malthus failed to foresee the huge technological advances from fertilizer to mechanization. However, that doesn't make his concerns forever moot - perhaps just tardy. It remains far from clear whether the limited land space and resources can take billions more humans - especially without killing off all the other species. (Especially, if we aren't willing to give up eating resource-intensive foods like cow in favor of less intensive one's like grasshopper.)
The book has some graphics as well as both a "references" and a "further reading" section.
If you're interested in food in a general sense, I'd recommend this as a great way to take in the outline of the topic.
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