15.6 — Food, and How the World's Plates Were Assembled

Italian food has no tomatoes until the sixteenth century. Indian food has no chillies. Irish and Bengali food has no potatoes. Thai and Sichuan food has no heat. Swiss chocolate does not exist.

Every one of those ingredients is American (Chapter 4.5), and every one arrived after 1492.

The cuisines that feel most timelessly national are, in most cases, under five hundred years old.

What people actually eat

A striking concentration. Around 60 percent of the world's calories come from three grasses: rice, wheat and maize. Add potatoes, cassava, soy, sugar and a handful of others and you have nearly all of it.

Of roughly 400,000 flowering plant species, a few thousand are edible, a few hundred have been domesticated, and about a dozen feed the world (Chapter 3.7).

And every one was domesticated by people with no writing, no metal and no concept of a gene. No plant breeder since has added a staple to the list.

The regional packages

Chapter 3.7 gave the centres of domestication. What each contributed.

Fertile Crescent: wheat, barley, lentils, chickpeas, peas, olives, grapes, figs, sheep, goats, cattle, pigs.

East Asia: rice, soy, millet, tea, citrus, chickens.

South Asia: rice varieties, mung and other pulses, aubergine, cucumber, sugarcane, black pepper, cardamom, turmeric, and zebu cattle (Chapter 3.7).

Africa: sorghum, pearl millet, African rice, yam, okra, coffee, watermelon, cowpea.

Mesoamerica and the Andes: maize, beans, squash, tomato, chilli, potato, sweet potato, cassava, cacao, vanilla, peanut, avocado, pineapple.

New Guinea: taro, banana, sugarcane.

The exchange

Chapter 8.5 covered it. Here is what it did to cooking.

To the Old World.

The chilli is the most consequential. It reached India with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century and displaced long pepper and black pepper as the main source of heat within a couple of centuries. It travelled onward to Southeast Asia, China, Korea and Africa. Sichuan cuisine, Thai curry, Korean gochujang, Hungarian paprika and every regional Indian masala are post-Columbian.

The tomato reached Italy in the sixteenth century and was regarded with suspicion for over a century — it is in the nightshade family and was thought poisonous, and there is a real basis for the suspicion, since acidic tomatoes leached lead from the pewter plates the wealthy used. The first Italian tomato pasta recipes are eighteenth century.

The potato transformed northern European demographics (Chapter 8.5) and reached India via the Portuguese and the British.

And maize became a staple across Africa and southern Europe, with the pellagra consequence of Chapter 4.5 where nixtamalization was not adopted.

To the New World: wheat, rice, sugarcane, coffee, bananas, citrus, cattle, pigs, chickens — and sugar above all, which is the crop that drove Chapter 8.6.

Spices

Chapter 8.4 established that the rotten-meat explanation is wrong — spices cost more than fresh meat.

What they were actually for. Taste. Status display, since they were expensive and visibly so. And medicine, within the humoral system, in which spices were classified as hot and dry and were prescribed to balance conditions thought to be cold and moist.

Where they came from. Black pepper from Malabar. Cinnamon from Ceylon. Cloves and nutmeg from a handful of eastern Indonesian islands and nowhere else (Chapter 8.4). Cardamom from the Western Ghats. Ginger and turmeric from South and Southeast Asia.

And the fact worth remembering. The voyages that connected the world, the conquest of the Americas, the Dutch destruction of the Banda Islands and the founding of the East India Company were all set in motion by demand for a small number of aromatic plant products.

Preservation

Before refrigeration, the whole of food technology was about stopping decay, and every major technique is ancient.

Drying, the oldest — removing water so microbes cannot grow.

Salting, by drawing water out osmotically. Salt's value throughout history is largely this, and it is why the salt tax mattered so much (Chapter 6.21).

Fermentation, which is the cleverest.** Deliberately encouraging benign microbes that produce acid or alcohol, which excludes harmful ones. Yoghurt, curd, cheese, idli and dosa batter, dhokla, pickles, kimchi, miso, soy sauce, bread, beer, wine and vinegar are all the same principle.

And it does more than preserve. Fermentation makes nutrients more available — the lactose problem of Chapter 3.8 is solved by it — reduces antinutrients such as phytates in grains and pulses, and produces vitamins. Idli and dosa fermentation increases B-vitamin content measurably.

Smoking, sugaring, pickling in oil or vinegar, and canning — the last invented in response to a prize offered by Napoleon for a method of preserving food for armies (Chapter 10.4), which is a good illustration of Chapter 8.3's point about war driving technology.

Refrigeration from the late nineteenth century, and the cold chain — continuous refrigeration from producer to consumer — which is what made fresh food a year-round global trade and which India still lacks at scale, with post-harvest losses in fruit and vegetables estimated in the range of 5 to 15 percent and higher in some categories.

Industrialisation

What changed in the last 150 years.

Mechanised milling, which made white flour and polished white rice cheap — and removed the bran and germ, which is where most of the vitamins and fibre are. Beriberi, a thiamine deficiency, became epidemic in Asian populations eating polished rice, and the identification of its cause by Christiaan Eijkman and others is one of the founding discoveries of vitamin science.

Industrial fertiliser (Chapter 14.6), which is the reason the current population can be fed.

Global cold chains and containerised shipping (Chapter 12.8), which made seasonality optional for those who can pay.

Fortification. Iodised salt, which has substantially reduced goitre and iodine-deficiency-related cognitive impairment worldwide and is one of the cheapest public health interventions ever implemented. Vitamin D in milk, folic acid in flour, and iron fortification.

And ultra-processed food, which is the current argument. The definition — the NOVA classification — covers formulations made largely from substances extracted from foods plus additives, with little intact food. Observational studies consistently associate high consumption with obesity, cardiovascular disease and mortality. The causal mechanism is contested: whether it is the processing itself, the energy density, the palatability that overrides satiety, or confounding with everything else that correlates with such diets. One well-controlled feeding trial found people ate several hundred more calories a day on an ultra-processed diet matched for nutrients, which is suggestive rather than conclusive.

What people should actually eat

Volume V covers nutrition properly. Here is what is robust, because the field is notoriously noisy.

What is well supported. More vegetables, fruit, whole grains, legumes and nuts. Less added sugar and less refined carbohydrate. Adequate protein. Not too much alcohol — and the recent evidence has moved against the idea that moderate drinking is protective, which was probably an artefact of comparing drinkers with abstainers who included people who had stopped for health reasons.

What has been overturned or heavily qualified. Dietary cholesterol has far less effect on blood cholesterol than was believed for decades. The case against saturated fat is weaker and more nuanced than the mid-twentieth-century consensus held, and it is not absent. And the low-fat guidance of the 1980s and 90s coincided with a rise in sugar consumption as fat was replaced.

Why nutrition science is so unreliable. Most of it is observational rather than experimental, because you cannot randomise people's diets for thirty years. People misreport what they eat, substantially and systematically. Confounding is severe — people who eat vegetables differ in many other ways. And industry funding of studies is common and has a documented association with favourable results.

Which produces a useful rule for reading any nutrition claim: ask whether it is from a randomised trial or an observational study, what the effect size is rather than the relative risk, and who funded it.

And the most defensible summary remains Michael Pollan's: eat food, not too much, mostly plants — where "food" means recognisable ingredients rather than formulations.

India's food situation

The transition in one generation. From food imports under American aid in the 1960s (Chapter 6.28) to surplus grain stocks.

And the current position is a double burden. Persistent undernutrition — stunting at around a third of children — alongside rising obesity and one of the world's largest diabetic populations. Both at once, frequently in the same household.

The causes of the first are not only calories. Sanitation matters enormously — repeated intestinal infection prevents absorption regardless of intake — and the evidence linking open defecation to stunting is strong. Maternal nutrition and the age of the mother matter. And dietary diversity, rather than staple quantity, is the binding constraint for micronutrients.

The public system. The Public Distribution System delivers subsidised grain to a very large share of the population. Midday meals in schools, which improve attendance and nutrition and are one of the better-evidenced Indian programmes. And the ICDS anganwadi network for young children and mothers.

And the millet argument. The shift from millets to rice and wheat under the Green Revolution's procurement incentives (Chapter 6.28) reduced dietary diversity and moved cultivation toward thirstier crops. Millets need less water, tolerate drought, have higher micronutrient content and suit the semi-arid Deccan. The current push to bring them back is a climate adaptation and a nutrition argument at once, and it requires changing the procurement system to succeed (Chapter 14.6).

Where this shows up in your life

Every meal.

And the observation that closes this Part. Food is where every thread in this volume meets. Geology decided the soil (Chapter 1.12). Climate decided what grows (Chapter 2.7). Domestication decided what was available (Chapter 3.7). Trade and conquest moved it around the world (Chapter 8.5). Colonialism decided who grew cash crops instead of food (Chapter 6.17). Industry decided how it is processed. And policy decides who can afford it (Chapter 6.17's entitlement argument).

A plate of rice with dal, a tomato in the sabzi and a chilli in the tempering is a summary of this entire book.

What Part 15 established

Calendars are negotiated constructions administered by rulers, and the week has no astronomical basis at all. India's festivals differ by region because agriculture, local deities, regional dynasties and different calendars all differ — and two of its most prominent public festivals were built into their modern form for political purposes within the last 130 years. The world's festivals sit on a common seasonal foundation and most of their current forms are under two centuries old. The working day, the weekend, retirement and schooling were legislated after organisation, against opposition, and are neither natural nor permanent. Languages die at a rate of one every few weeks, and India's linguistic settlement is one of the more successful accommodations of diversity anywhere. And the cuisines that feel most ancient are mostly post-Columbian assemblies of ingredients from four continents.

What the next Part covers

Part 16 is the one this volume was written for. The patterns that actually repeat across the whole story. Why civilizations collapse, and what the collapses have in common. What makes a society rich, free and stable, gathered from every Part that touched it. How to read history without being manipulated by it, which is the practical chapter. And a single connected thread from a cloud of dust orbiting a young star to the news on your phone this morning.