Part One is about overcoming prejudice through using the author's own experience overcoming his aversion to food like okra (I can relate, hate that thing), and the next is about becoming more productive, then the third is about doing better globally and the fourth and last sections are about living together and thinking of the future. All the foods are organised thematically in five parts, which keeps them organised enough because sometimes the author tends to wander around a bit.

Using foodstuffs that go from meat (anchovy, beef, chicken, prawn) to veggies (carrot, okra), nuts (acorn) and fruit (banana, strawberry), to processed food (noodles) and finally drinks & desserts (Coca-Cola, chocolate), as conversation starters, each of the chapters dedicated to a given foodstuff will teach you something about economics. That makes it so very understandable, put so simply, than the complex sociological and economical theories most of us would find labyrinthine at best and boring or dry at worst. Taking the example of the humble anchovy, he tells us how the raw materials based economies were ruined by the surge of synthetic substitutes, as happened to guano, rubber, and dyes, on which economies such as Peru's, Brazil's and Guatemala's were dependent on to prosper, and how this can happen again (and why). This book isn't about the economy of food production from planting to the market's shelf but about worldwide economics explained through food, a clever concept that makes economics accessible for the layperson.īeing one of the laypeople who thinks of economy only when deciding between a 0.9 kg can or a 300 g can of anchovies in olive oil on a given run to the supermarket, I appreciated how Mr Chang used commonly eaten and popular foodstuff across the world to explain economic theories, political-economic systems, processes, and even an economist's overview of world history from the recent past to the present.

Ha joon chang edible economics