After three months, I finally powered through the end. The final third of the book was enjoyable; I'm just disappointed it took that far to really get interesting. Though the first portion wasn't easy to get through, Tom's insight on the future of food availability and its impact on society was interesting and on par with his conclusions in 6 Glasses. ( )

A dry recap of well-trod food history. If you had to read one book to ingest the conventional view, this would be it; but if you're actually interested, you'd be better off reading a few books by authors who are actually *interested* in agriculture. ( )

The beginning was interesting but got rather dull towards the end. The author is a business writer for "The Economist" and boy can you tell he is! The whole later half of the book may as well have been titled, "The economics of items tangentially related to food" rather than, "An Edible history of Humanity". Other people might enjoy his perspective but I think I was looking for a book about food history and culture instead of economic theories. ( )

I mostly liked this author's "A History of the World in Six Drinks" for the small stuff. it's one thing to write about, say, Napoleon or democracy and quite another to try to figure out what eighteenth-century Frenchmen really thought about coffee. There isn't exactly a lot of that here. Standage does a very creditable job of making the case that food is a prime mover in human history and explaining how, exactly, we got to where we are, dietetically speaking. He skillfully reframes some big transitions in human history, such as the move from hunting and gathering to agriculture and from natural energy sources to industrial production. It's the sort of book everyone should read, though I rather suspect that readers who have read more deeply in history than I have will have already heard much of this from other authors. Perhaps it's the sort of history that I should have read long ago. Still, it's efficient and well composed and a good starting place for those just just starting to get their historical bearings. Fans of Yuval Harari will probably find a lot to like here. Readers looking for delectable morsels of long-buried historical knowledge may have to look elsewhere, though. ( )

nonfiction/social history (audiobook). It was an ok way to pass 9 hours driving. The narrator's voices (for Columbus, British and Dutch diplomats, etc.) all tend to sound like the same voice--pompous and condescending--and his Asian and African accents need work, but it was OK. ( )