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PORTSIDE CULTURE

A BOOK COMES CLOSE TO A UNIFIED THEORY OF FOOD. IT’S A BIG JOB.  
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Pete Wells
February 5, 2025
The New York Times

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_ In “How the World Eats,” the philosopher Julian Baggini
grapples with “everything that affects and is affected by” our
comestibles. _

Julian Baggini describes cacao plantations in Ghana where farmers
frequently earn less per day than the price of a Hershey bar. ,
Thorsten Futh/laif, via Redux

 

HOW THE WORLD EATS: A Global Food Philosophy, by Julian Baggini

 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 theconcrete details that make
“How the World Eats” absorbing.

HOW THE WORLD EATS: A Global Food Philosophy | By Julian Baggini |
Pegasus | 443 pp. | $30

Pete Wells was the restaurant critic for The Times from 2012 until
2024. He was previously the editor of the Food section. More about
Pete Wells

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