An Edible History of Humanity
By Tom Standage
Atlantic Books £19.99, 269 pages
FT Bookshop price: £15.99

An Edible History of Humanity is a fascinating history of the role of food in causing, enabling and influencing successive transformations of human society. Tom Standage, business editor of the Economist, begins his book by discussing how farming gradually overtook hunter-gathering in the distant past, often with ill effects on human health.

The creation of more settled communities led to social hierarchies, and later towns and cities. Today, the distribution of language and human genes still reflects the advent of farming. As humans reconfigured plants, so plants reconfigured humans. The result is us.

This mutual reconfiguring is at the basis of civilisation, says Standage. As he points out, almost none of the food we now eat can be described as “natural”. Our staple crops – maize, wheat, rice, potatoes – and the animals we eat are the product of genetic engineering and displacement over thousands of years; most could not survive long in their present form if humans disappeared.

This means that we have developed some unlikely mutations and made some unlikely genetic alliances. Anyone who today objects to genetic modification of any kind will find this book instructive reading.

Once hierarchies had been established within settled communities at different times and places, those at the top began to develop exotic and expensive tastes – for spices, for example.

The expansion of Islam across trade routes after 750AD contributed to the European exploration of alternative routes: westwards across the Atlantic, eastwards across the Bay of Bengal. The spice-seeking voyages of the 15th and 16th centuries revealed the true geography of the earth and laid the foundations for the future colonial empires.

Standage argues that food was among the factors that enabled the industrial revolution in Britain from the 18th century. Wealth generated by trade in such commodities as sugar, maize and eventually potatoes, and a great increase in agricultural productivity, allowed the development of industry.

Population increased dramatically at this time. Step forward Thomas Malthus who foresaw imminent disaster as population grew faster than the means to support it. Then came Adam Smith, who wrote that with an abundance of food, more people would move into manufacturing and related activities. Using cheap coal as an energy source, Britain could afford to import food and abandon self-sufficiency.

Standage explores the many ways in which food has been used as a fuel of war, in intimidation and in oppression. Napoleon, Stalin, Mao Zedong and Mugabe are not alone in this respect.

The green revolution of the 1960s increased agricultural yields. By the beginning of this century, new seed varieties of wheat accounted for 86 per cent of cultivated wheat in Asia, 90 per cent in Latin America and 66 per cent in Africa and the Middle East.

We are at a crossroads, Standage says. Step forward Malthus again. Human population rose at a giddy rate throughout the last century. By 2050 it could be more than three times its 1950 level. A second green revolution, using new chemical methods, may be on its way.

But other problems loom large: climate change; pollution of land, sea and air; resource depletion and increase in waste; shortages of fresh water; rising sea levels and acidification; technological hazards; and damage to the ecosystems on which we depend.

This is an extraordinary and well-told story, a much neglected dimension to history.

Sir Crispin Tickell is Director of the Policy Foresight Programme at the James Martin 21st Century School at Oxford University