Fish Tales

Twenty-five years ago, Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World hit the shelves. The book was a surprise sensation, a New York Times bestseller about a fish that, by Kurlansky’s own reckoning, the average American ate, at most, 4 pounds of each year. (That average American consumed, by contrast, 233 pounds of red meat.) Cod also spawned its own genre of global food microhistories. By 1999, just two years later, readers could consume books on the “humble potato,” nutmeg, and chocolate.

Cod wasn’t the first history to use food as a lens. Sidney W. Mintz’s 1985 classic, Sweetness and Power, showed how the trajectory of a food—in Mintz’s case, sugar—could be used to tell a story of imperial power, the rise of the modern world, and the unattributed contributions of marginalized people. The driving force of the sugar economy was Africans enslaved in the Americas, and in turn they powered the rise of the British and French empires.

But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with the emerging idea of globalization challenging the supremacy of hegemonic state power, Kurlansky’s started a trend. Books looking at the history of the world through one food captured readers’ attention at a particular moment of global economic change. Judith A. Carney’s , published in 2001, presented a hotly debated new interpretation of Africa’s technological and intellectual contributions to the rise of agriculture in the Americas. A few years later, volumes on