Empires of Food : Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

by Evan D.G. Fraser; Andrew Rimas

• ISBN13: 9781439101896
• ISBN10: 1439101892
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-06-15
• Publisher: Free Press

Summary

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 Foodvividly chronicles the fate of people and societies for the past twelve thousand years through the foods they grew, hunted, traded, and ateand 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 the 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 Foodbrilliantly 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 foodand 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 the prism of the dining table,Empires of Foodoffers a grand scope and a provocative analysis of the world today, indispensable in this time of global warming and food crises.

Author Biography

Evan D. G. Fraser is an adjunct professor of geography at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, and a Senior Lecturer at the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds in the UK. His research is on farming, climate change, and the environment. He lives in the Yorkshire Dales with his wife and three children.
Andrew Rimas is a journalist and the managing editor at the Improper Bostonian magazine; previously he was an associate editor and staff writer at Boston magazine. His work has frequently appeared in those publications and in The Boston Globe Magazine and The Boston Globe.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. xi
The Price of Food	p. 1
The Three Gorges Dam	p. 3
The Rise and Fall of Food Empires, Past, Present, and Future	p. 7
Fairs: The Food Trade	p. 13
The Desert Fathers	p. 16
Work, Pray, Eat	p. 18
The Agricultural Revolution of A.D. 900	p. 20
Fayre Is Fair	p. 22
The Pendulum Swings	p. 28
The Pendulum Swings Back	p. 32
Manure from the Bones	p. 37
Larders: What Do You Do with Ten Thousand Tons of Grain?	p. 41
National Security and a War on Terror	p. 43
Bread Alone	p. 46
Not by Bread Alone: Oil and Fish	p. 49
Hannibal Lectured	p. 52
A Question of Logistics	p. 57
Grounds for Exhaustion	p. 59
How to Feed an Empire, Cheap	p. 62
The Larder Is Empty	p. 64
Farms: Growing Food for Profit and Environmental Rapine	p. 69
The Grapes of Wrath	p. 72
God in the Cup	p. 79
The Weak Heart of Today's Food Empire	p. 86
The Price Rises	p. 91
An Experiment in Survival	p. 93
Chicken Little or a Lot of Chicken?	p. 97
Water: Irrigation's Questionable Cure	p. 101
Mesopotamia's Fix	p. 104
In Praise of Grain	p. 107
Oriental Despotism	p. 110
Retreat of the Elephants	p. 115
The Yellowing River	p. 118
Water, Water Everywhere?	p. 121
Dirt: The Chemistry of Life	p. 125
The Story of N	p. 126
In Praise of Phytoplankton	p. 129
Fecal Politics	p. 131
War Empires	p. 136
The Birds of Peru	p. 141
Ice: Preserve Us	p. 145
How Food Rots and How to Slow It Down	p. 146
It's a Jungle	p. 150
The Industrial Garden State	p. 152
Triumph of the Tomato	p. 156
California Scheming	p. 159
The Orange Juice Quandary	p. 161
Empty Pockets	p. 165
Storm Clouds	p. 167
Blood: The Conquest of Food	p. 173
Rebellion in the Spice Islands	p. 179
Chiapas	p. 183
The Moral Economy of Food	p. 187
The Climate Trigger	p. 193
Money: Tea and Famine	p. 197
A Foundation in Pirates	p. 199
Victorian High Tea	p. 203
Her Majesty's Drug Cartel	p. 205
"In America, There Could Be No Famine..."	p. 209
The Great Hunger	p. 212
The Food Empires Ahead	p. 214
Time: Fair, Organic, and Slow	p. 219
The Meaning of Fairness	p. 222
Greener Pastures	p. 230
The Snail Triumphant	p. 235
Conclusion: The New Gluttony and Tomorrow's Menu	p. 243
Acknowledgments	p. 255
Notes	p. 257
Index	p. 289
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.