The best books on how the desire for foods and drugs shaped the world

I grew up hearing about how civilization emerged because of striving to get there, that it was intentional and glorious, a huge progressive step.

Scott is brilliant at showing how living in large, organized groups was an unintended outcome, fragile and precarious and often a failure: not an accident but not willed into being, either. It came from certain kinds of environments, mostly riverine regions that often flooded, where humans could live in larger groups because of grains. Then, as powerful people were able to “tax” the possessors of grain-bearing plants—because they were visible and vulnerable—states emerged.

In other words, Scott shows that our ways of life came from something more like natural law than from any sort of revelation or forethought. The nature of grains did it. 

Amitav Ghosh is a fantastic storyteller, and this one is especially hair-raising.

It begins with a gripping narrative about the massacre of the leaders of the people of the Banda Islands by frightened interlopers, officers of the Dutch East India Company (the VOC). The five small Banda islands supplied the world with nutmeg, and the VOC had, it thought, monopolized the trade by requiring that the locals trade only with them as part of a protection racket—but suspicions about smuggling were rife. In the end, a genocide was enacted in order to control the nutmeg trade.

Ghosh draws on this example as a metaphor about our own world. Written during the covid epidemic when he was in isolation in New York City and unable to visit family elsewhere in the world, in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, with climate change accelerating along with destruction of environments and the peoples who inhabit them—and during the first Trump administration’s jingoism—he paints a dark view of past and present but with rays of hope from the ways that the human spirit sometimes faces the other spirits of the world rather than turning away from them. The craving for pleasure did it. 

I was amazed at Taussig’s ability to combine personal description and anecdote with system analysis to reveal “the real.” This is a lyrical account of a useful plant turned into a worldwide commodity.

Palma Africana is better known as an oil palm, and its substance pervades a host of products in the modern economy of consumer goods. In Taussig’s episodic and fast-paced tale, we move from drinking beer with companions in strange new places to the ghosts of night-time jaguars and their corporeal human revenants. Those who know how to grow capital begin by displacing local people with cattle before moving to coca production and then clear-cutting for palm plantations, whose green and glossy images are found in the advertising spreads of Wall Street boardrooms.

The capital-generating methods of the predators are evident in the slouched figures with weapons at their side while riding above the people, keeping to the shadows in villages on the edge of everywhere. The disappearing act of the production of consumption does it. 

I was quite taken by Laudan’s attention to the preparation of foods, from deep time to the present, in many of the regions of the world. She is attentive to mixtures: in any dish, in the kinds of dishes served for meals of different kinds, in the sharing and exchanging of tastes, and in the close relationships between dining and worship.

Beginning with the simple motions of a woman grinding grain on stone for the daily meal, or pounding hulls in a vessel, to the innumerable kitchen attendants needed to turn raw materials into ingredients for palace feasts, or the labor-saving kitchen appliances of fast-paced modernity, the ability to break bread in community has long depended on local ecologies and ways of life, as well as human ability to make the best of what is to hand. In fact, she sees the rise of distinctive world food cultures not as self-conscious signifiers of identity so much as expressions of situated place in an ecology.

A fascinating and comprehensive tour, humane and thoughtful. The cooks make the meal.  

I found Rappaport’s book to be a really marvelous example of what is now being called “entangled history.” That kind of history picks up one topic and follows it wherever it leads. Because tangible things are easier to trace than intangible things (like ideas or rumors), commodity history is a lively subject, but this is something larger.

Tea has a chemistry to it that people gravitate toward, but there is so much more to the story about why it is so widely consumed in our world today. Once it was a substance grown and sipped in China, but European trading companies also discovered that markets for it could be created. It was famously a commodity deeply entangled in the opium wars, in the new plantation economies of northeastern India and Sri Lanka/Ceylon, and other systems of production.

But Rappaport has so much more to say about the consumption side, too: how it was imbibed, in what circumstances, where, and how it gave comfort. Enormously informed, she keeps the narrative moving from one thing to another without losing the thread. Impressive. She shows how you can see the whole world in a cup.