Food has shaped humanity for more than three million years. It helped fuel our evolution, changed our bodies and brains, made agriculture and civilisation possible, and ultimately created the extraordinarily complex global food system that feeds us today.
Food and Us tells the remarkable story of this relationship - from our earliest ancestors and the discovery of cooking, through agriculture, trade and industrialisation, to the transformation of food production in the modern world.
We didn't just evolve with food. We evolved because of it.
But the relationship works both ways. As food shaped humanity, humanity increasingly learned to reshape food.
The twentieth century brought extraordinary advances in agricultural productivity, food science, processing, preservation, manufacturing and global distribution. Food became safer, more abundant, more affordable and more convenient for billions of people. At the same time, the pace of change accelerated dramatically.
Today, our food system sits at the centre of some of society's most important questions. How well does our modern food environment match the biology we evolved with? What role should food processing play? Why have obesity and diet-related disease risen alongside unprecedented food abundance? And how do we continue feeding a growing global population while protecting the health of both people and the planet?
Drawing on food history, human evolution, science, technology and the author's experience of the food industry, Food and Us explores how we arrived at this point - and where our relationship with food might go next.