An Edible History Of Humanity Summary

In An Edible History of Humanity, (chapters 9-12) Standage discusses how food essentially causes warfare, including creating nourishment protection strategies for military purposes. Standage also talks about the Green Revolution, a leap forward in cultivating advancements and systems that happened in the 1940s to generally the 1970s which incredibly expanded crop yields. In this last piece of the novel we read about food and its role in war, the discovery of Ammonia, and the Green Revolution.
At the start of this part Standage writes concerning about how food has been used as a weapon. Food in our modern historical past have been the best weapon of preference, having the ability to obliterate a total population without armed forces. For example when Germany was split into East and West Germany, the U.S. and Britain sent sustenance West Germany until the contention finished. “Supplying the two million people in West Berlin, it was calculated, would mean delivering some fifteen hundred tons of food…” (Standage 173). The quote clearly describes what the U.S. was doing to supply the starving people in West Germany. As we can see if it wouldn’t have been for the U.S. dropping …show more content…
The discovery of how to make Ammonia created the making of significantly more powerful fertilizers, thus bringing about an extensive populace blast. “Opening up a valuable and much-needed new source of fertilizer and making possible a vast expansion of the food supply-and, as a consequence, of the human population.”(Standage 345) The quote shows us that with the help of new fertilizers food supply would rise causing the human population to increase in size as well. However, to completely take advantage of the new fertilizers, crossbred “smaller” types of harvests were developed to support the heaviness of the extended seeds from Maize and grains, increasing production even