Food and globalization: consumption, markets and politics in the modern world – Edited by Alexander Nutzenadel and Frank Trentmann

As the editors (accurately) write, ‘the focus of this volume is to recover the material, political, and moral dynamics of food, connecting early modern to contemporary processes of globalization’ (p. 5). The approach – and many of the contributions – is historical and the focus is very much on the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century backgrounds to global food issues today. This is not a book about the food crisis and globalisation today. The relevance of history is soon clear, and underlined by the editors in an excellent short introduction. The book ends with a chapter by Trentmann which threads together some of the key ideas in the volume: empire, free trade and distributive justice, in a convincing and thoughtful way. In its conception and execution this is a scholarly and original book for the academic market, written from within a humanities tradition (footnotes rather than Harvard referencing), often elegant prose and measured judgement. It is the kind of synthetic, relevant history that we would expect from Trentmann and Nutzenadel. The individual chapters tell different parts of the story. The first section begins with a chapter by the eminent anthropologist Sidney Mintz on the relationship between food, culture and energy, which reviews the role of food and taste to metropolitan diets, and the idiosyncrasies of different cultural practices. It is a gem: brief, discursive, humorous and yet to the point. Other chapters are more historically contextual: on global ‘beverages’ from 1500 to 1900, on horticulture after the American Civil War, on rice cultivation in Southeast Asia. The second section of the book looks at the ‘migration’ of food tastes and consumer cultures, largely stimulated by imperial ‘preferences’ and economic dependence. The third section deals with food markets and the international politics of food – ending with a chapter on transnational agribusiness within the United Nations system. The final (fourth) section takes the narrative into today’s world, with brief pieces on ‘postcolonial paradoxes’, and the ‘moral geographies’ of sugar. This is a useful if rather heterogeneous collection. It uses a historical approach in a way designed to appeal to both historians and non-historians alike. I am equally clear that the discussion of globalisation would have benefited from more reference to the burgeoning literature in the social sciences, but the volume would have then lost its key focus – on the historical dimension of processes. The title is perhaps a little misleading – it suggests more attention to issues that are scarcely discussed here – famine and food supply, nutrition policy, and perhaps particularly, the way in which the modern food system developed, through the international agricultural centres. It might also have taken in fair trade today, and ethical consumption today, but to have done so would have enlarged the already considerable breadth of the book. It is a nice piece of interdisciplinary work, and deserves serious critical attention from scholars in a variety of disciplines. MICHAEL REDCLIFT, King’s College London