“How to Feed the World: The History and Future of Food” by Vaclav Smil
c.2025 / Viking / $30 / 272 pages
Your plate, at first, seemed like it was too big.
The fancy food you got was presented nicely but the portions were small, so the plate looked massive. Two bites, you wiped your mouth, and you might need a snack later. That’s OK, it was an interesting experience, right? So now read the new book, “How to Feed the World” by Vaclav Smil, and help make sure there’s enough for everyone.
What will dinner be like on a random evening in 2050? It’s hard to say — you might not even know about dinner tonight — but the future is worth thinking about, especially in today’s world. One thing you can bet on, though, is that diets in the future will change and adapt, just as they did for our ancestors.
Early hominins, says Smil, likely ate what they observed animals eating, but foraging can’t grow a larger population. Also, humans couldn’t survive on, say, a gorilla diet or a lion’s dinner because humans have different nutritional needs and, as a species, they didn’t all live in the same general climate. These limitations meant that, to sustain a larger population, humans almost had to domesticate crops and animals to feed larger communities.
We can, in fact, thank agriculture for what much of what we have to eat, and otherwise. Farming was the only way, says Smil, for “mass-scale…sourcing [of] food that could have led to larger populations capable of new technological and intellectual advances…”
To understand how to invite the world to the table most efficiently and nutritionally, we first must understand why we eat some things “and not others,” and why humans can’t live on just any old thing tossed in a bowl. We should acknowledge that global warming may have a few positive effects. Education on proposed methods of increasing food sources and their viability is key. We can utilize new technologies, and we can stop wasting food.
If you’re like most people, what’s on your plate at your next meal is, to some degree, important. You may debate what to eat, plan the meal carefully and make it purposefully. That you can eat is something you may not even think much about, but you will after reading, “How to Feed the World.”
Just merely having food on the table seems amazing, in author Vaclav Smil’s hands — never mind having more in the pantry. To understand why that’s so and why we eat what we eat, there’s a lot of math to learn, along with science, history and archaeology. Though it can sometimes be overwhelming, Smil helps even the least math-and-science-minded reader to clearly see how care, mindfulness, and open-mindedness can ensure that the table holds enough for us all.
If you’re concerned about your family’s well-being or what the world’s future holds in this contentious world, this book helps. It’s one for forward thinkers, food producers, cooks, chefs, and activists, and if that’s you or if you just plain love to eat, “How to Feed the World” will put some great ideas on your plate.
