Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology, by Chris Otter

Abstract

Reviewed by: Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology by Chris Otter Susannah Ottaway (bio) Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology, by Chris Otter; pp. 411. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020, $49.00, $48.99 paper, $48.99 ebook. Fifty years ago, Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet (1971) identified the American world food system as a major cause of the environmental and public health crises affecting the world. Chris Otter's terrific book on the British food transition firmly centers post-1800 Britain at the origin of these crises, as Britain developed a "large-planet philosophy" that treated the entire earth as a source of material wealth and capital investment for the nation (3). This philosophy underpinned the enduring features of nineteenth-century British food systems: the outsourcing of food production to colonial hinterlands; a diet centered on meat, wheat, and sugar; the exercise of power and violence through newly established foodways; and the systematic ecological destruction of vast swaths of land for the supposed benefit of the imperial homeland. Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology synthesizes a tremendous range of scholarship into a genuinely interdisciplinary narrative that draws from ecology, economics, history, science and technology studies, nutritional science, and evolutionary biology. Especially for the Victorian era, Otter's primary source base is remarkably deep, most notably including medical journals, industry textbooks, a range of parliamentary papers, newspapers, farming treatises, surveys, cookbooks, and first-person accounts. The book's illustrations are well-selected, often vividly, sometimes horrifically, capturing the scope and texture of the effects of the nutrition transition (best not to read the food pathogen or dental section before dinner . . .). The first and most straight-forward section focuses on the transformation in agrofood systems from circa 1820; as Otter evocatively explains, the British diet was reshaped into the "carnivorous, saccharized norms of Western capitalist society" (12). The nutrition transition witnessed the "meatification" of the British diet, the dominance of wheat, diminished fiber, and increased sugar and fat consumption (23). Food production was expanded, industrialized, and mechanized, as it was embedded into the systematic exploitation of commodity frontiers whose products were processed, packaged, and transported over long distances to Britain. The ideology of political economy combined with a view of frontier lands as empty spaces with subject populations who could be forced to transform "wilderness into cornfields," justifying extensive imperial violence and wholesale extraction of resources (66). This was more than an economic and ecological change: "Smithian and Ricardian ideas became interwoven with British identity via the experience of cheap food" (9). Meat, for example, became not just a symbol of [End Page 532] British manliness and power, but also a staple commodity that was demanded in cheap and plentiful quantities. Relationships between humans and animals were transformed, with slaughter removed from the public eye to abbatoirs, part of a broader phenomenon whereby "making meat and eating meat were spatially dissevered" (37). Wheat followed a distinctly parallel process of transformation, guided by science, garnered through racialized labor exploitation, and culminating in the mass production of uniform white loaves to feed the industrial proletariat. These workers shared with all Britons an addiction to sugar that seemed to transcend classes, as it followed a similar arc toward mass production across the century. Sugar consumption for workers was seen not as a luxury, but as a necessary technique to give energy to workers' bodies. Sugar consumption was encouraged because "plugging the body into the industrialized sugar system appealed to a thermodynamically aware society haunted by fears of exhaustion and entropy" (96). The latter sections of the book trace the ramifications of this nutrition transition. Through an analysis of "Risk" and "Violence," Otter unveils a series of food disasters produced by the large planet systems that eventually led Britons to adopt a "sanitary landscape" for food production and distribution (129). He analyzes the slow violence of the British imperial food transition, which devalued lives (as in the "protein racism" of policies in India), lands, and livestock from the colonial periphery for the sake of ensuring the security of the metropole (141). While...