How does “An Edible History” fit in with “A History of the World in 6 Glasses”?
I was on tour for the drinks book, and my wife said, “You’re gonna do food next, right?” The history of food is actually a much more serious story. The drinks book is quite frivolous: It says each era has a dominant drink, and each drink didn’t do much more than reflect what is already going on. I’m not really saying that drinks changed the world. There’s a contrarian streak to this book: You argue that crops are less natural than we think, and you see contradictions in the locavore movement. What I’m trying to do is take a level-headed view of our food culture, and some of that ends up not agreeing with the food fads of the moment. They’re rather like fundamentalist religions. The people who say we need only biotechnology, or only organic food, or only local food — I don’t think are right. The trick is to work out when we should use one and when the other. Your book appears at a time when there are a lot of serious books about food. I divide the other books into two categories: The k
