num_pages: 0
description: Almost no one knew what a potato was in 1500. Today they are the world's fourth most important food crop. Feeding the People traces the global journey of this popular foodstuff from the Andes to everywhere. The potato's global history makes visible the ways in which our ideas about eating are entangled with the emergence of capitalism and its celebration of the free market. The potato's story also reminds us that ordinary people make history in ways that continue to shape our lives. Potatoes in short are a good way of rethinking the origins of our modern world. Feeding the People tells the story of how eating became part of statecraft and provides a new account of the global spread of one of the world's most important foods.In following the global travels of the peripatetic potato Earle brilliantly illuminates both the origins of dietary advice that promised the key to happiness and the everyday ingenuity of farmers and cooks who really do feed the people. Jeffrey M. Pilcher - author of Planet Taco: A Global History of Mexican FoodIf theyre delicious when you choose to eat them but penitentially bland when youre told you have to you may be eating potatoes which as Rebecca Earle argues in her brilliant study of the shape-shifting tubers provided the first taste of the tension between personal freedom and public well-being within the modern state. Joyce E. Chaplin - author of The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of GeniusPotatoes have inspired great books and great recipes. Rebecca Earle describes some unalluring dishes but her history - cultural culinary social political and environmental - is the cream of the crop: for coverage scholarship breadth and depth of erudition vividness in exemplification and fluency in writing no previous work can touch it. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto - author of Out of Our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It
language: None
title: Feeding the People: The Politics of the Potato
publisher: Cambridge University Press