When we talk about the food system, we usually mean a whole rat’s nest of businesses and institutions engaged in feeding people, from half-acre organic turnip farms to multinational corporations brewing chemicals meant to kill every plant in sight. Some of these businesses connect. Many don’t. Taken as a whole, the system is anything but systematic.
In “How the World Eats,” the philosopher Julian Baggini rejects the term right at the start, calling it, sensibly enough, “difficult to clearly define, let alone describe.” Instead, Baggini prefers “food world,” by which he means “everything that affects and is affected by human food.” This is more than any one book can contain. Still, “How the World Eats” probably comes as close as one could.
This is not the prolific Baggini’s first trip through the philosophical buffet line. In 2014 he came out with “The Virtues of the Table: How to Eat and Think,” a collection of essays encouraging us to be mindful of such everyday acts as buying a chunk of Parmigiano-Reggiano and baking a blackberry crumble.
This time around, he’s at the other end of the telescope. Very little of “How the World Eats” is about cooking or eating at home. Most of it is an attempt to come to terms, ethically and logically, with the implications of producing food on an industrial scale and moving it from one part of the world to another.
It is remarkable just how much ground Baggini covers. He writes about the plantations in Ghana where cacao farmers, many of them children, earn a dollar a day on average — less than the price of a Hershey’s Milk Chocolate bar. He tells us about a state-of-the-art fish farm that fattens massive colonies of cobia in netted columns eight miles off the coast of Panama, where the water’s currents can help disperse the waste that would build up at an inland fish farm.
By the end of the book, he has given us glimpses of the Great Rift Valley in East Africa, the Argentine Pampas, Bhutanese mountain villages and clove fields in Zanzibar. Along the way, he spins through millenniums of food culture, from hunter-gatherer societies (seen today in the contemporary Hadza of Tanzania, who forage a diet so varied that they carry more types of bacteria in their gut microbiomes than people in many industrialized nations) to the age of NASA (whose shelf-stable pouches proved so monotonous, Baggini tells us, that astronauts lost weight on every American space mission except Skylab).
Although he is trying to pin down large notions like social responsibility and cultural identity, Baggini has a historian’s interest in the texture of actual facts on the ground. He leads us on digressions about the nutritional value of beluga whale meat, the advantages that shorter stalks confer on hybrid strains of wheat, Gandhi’s challenge to the British monopoly on salt in India and the boom market for fertilizer made from bird poop that culminated in the Guano Islands Act of 1856.
Baggini’s attraction to detail makes “How the World Eats” a surprisingly vivid read. For all the clarity of his prose, he is not afraid of complication. At times, he revels in it.
One of his frequent themes is that organic practices do not work well for all crops in all places, and have little chance of cranking out enough food for the whole planet, while high-tech intensive farming isn’t always as harmful as critics make it out to be. Nitrogen fertilizers derived from fossil fuels are anathema to environmentalists, but Baggini argues that synthetic fertilizers “could be produced indefinitely using renewable energy.” No-till agriculture, which relies on highly mechanized equipment for sowing seeds and applying pesticide, can make for healthier soil.
Shades of gray like these don’t often creep into our conversations about modern food networks. It’s welcome to get a tour of the food world from a writer who is not in any camp except that of reason.
At times Baggini’s evenhandedness can be tough on the reader, who has to slalom through pages on which nearly every sentence is staked with “but,” “still” or “however.” More seriously, some of his conclusions are striking in their blandness. After walking us through the commodity markets’ exploitation of those coffee and cacao workers, many of whom are essentially enslaved, he concludes: “A more equitable food world should be everyone’s goal, but realistic reform requires a fairer commodity market, not its abolition. That is easier said than done.”
A high tolerance for nuance can be more helpful in tracing the shape of a problem than in figuring out solutions. Here is where the cosmic scope of Baggini’s project comes back to bite him. Describing child slavery, cultured meat, deforestation, caged chickens, gene editing and zoonotic disease outbreaks is one thing. Wrapping all of them — and much more — into what he calls “a theoretically coherent and conceptually clear whole” is something else entirely, and at times “How the World Eats” seems like a “Key to All Mythologies” written for people who buy fair-trade coffee beans.
If one thread runs through all the networks Baggini invokes, invisibly molding and directing them, it’s power: corporate power, obviously, but also the power of governments, NGOs, commodities markets and throngs of consumers. He recognizes this, but never quite wrestles with it, though he does admit that “the question of where power lies in any system is always important.” As critiques of institutional forces go, this is not exactly Foucault.
Baggini’s research into how the world works turns out to be more interesting than his reflections on what it all means. But for eaters with an appetite for facts, there is much to enjoy. The abstract ideas are meant to be the point, but it’s the concrete details that make “How the World Eats” absorbing.
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