The food stories are not just a pretext for a dry lecture, they are fascinating and engaging in themselves - so much engaging that you won’t realize when they morph into the economic ones. The author has an uncanny ability to connect very different topics into one coherent tale - say, pasta and automobile industry, or anchovy, guano and fertilizers. Este es el cuarto libro que leo del economista coreano. Él lo califica de extraño, pero fascinante es el adjetivo que le hace mayor justicia. I don’t believe that there’s just one kind of capitalism. There are many different kinds, and we can make institutional changes to make capitalism more humane. You are what you eat, in the same way that you are what you know, the book seems to say. A seemingly unlikely parallel is drawn between the understanding of food and economic thinking, only to reveal itself as universal and foundational as human existence itself. At the end of the day, we are no hunter-gatherers and our economic activities and financial choices are what brings food to the table. We have a choice, therefore, both in our economic choices and our dietary selections. This book is an encouragement to choose to broaden our culinary horizons and seek a diverse economic diet. Diversity will not only make difficult concepts more palatable, but it will also surely enrich our lives. Economic thinking - about globalisation, climate change, immigration, austerity, automation and much more - in its most digestible form

I would be lying if I said I didn't have passion for food. So when I saw this unusual premise of explaining economics through what we eat, I had to read it. This is the intro to economics we all needed 10 years ago in school and it certainly is the one we need now to make sense of all sorts of conversations in the media.

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For decades, a single, free-market philosophy has dominated global economics. But this intellectual monoculture is bland and unhealthy. Este libro es fascinante porque conjuga con eficacia la gastronomía, la historia , la geografía y la economía. Permite viajar en el tiempo, por lugares diversos, conociendo detalles sabrosos de los alimentos y de ricas tradiciones culinarias, enlazando todo aquello con reflexiones convincentes sobre problemáticas económicas que repercuten en la vida cotidiana de todos los habitantes de este planeta. I enjoyed the conversational and anecdotal format, and the interlinking of stuff I knew with stuff I didn't. Being a history reader, I knew about events like those told in the Anchovy chapter, the Banana chapter, etc., and had a basic understanding of some economic phenomena such as industrialisation overtaking raw-materials based economies in terms of income and prosperity. It reminded me a bit of A History of the World in 6 Glasses in style and aims, though with a different focus as Standage's is history and Chang's is economy. I love this intermingling of foodie enthusiasm and academic erudition!

Being 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. 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). 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. For starters, this book is not about the economics of food. It's rather a compilation of personal anecdotes, food history tidbits, and a critique of economic theories to explain the world we live in. Bestselling author and economist Ha-Joon Chang makes challenging economic ideas delicious by plating them alongside stories about food from around the world, using the diverse histories behind familiar food items to explore economic theory. For Chang, chocolate is a lifelong addiction, but more exciting are the insights it offers into postindustrial knowledge economies; and while okra makes Southern gumbo heart-meltingly smooth, it also speaks of capitalism’s entangled relationship with freedom. Each bite-sized chapter takes the name of a food that, somewhere in the world, is a store-cupboard staple –okra, noodles, anchovies, Coca-Cola – using their histories, recipes and cultural importance to explore a variety of different economic theories. For example, in ‘Strawberry’, Chang explains how this labour-intensive fruit (actually not a berry) has contributed to the rise in low-wage jobs and, later, the automation that is seen as ‘the destroyer’ of those jobs (actually, Chang writes, it isn’t).As enjoyable as the culinary mentions were, their connection to economics didn't always work. The chapters were either a hit or a miss. But that doesn't take away from how engaging the book was.