Impressum

Bits & Bites: The Invention of Food.

Title of the original German edition:

Die Erfindung des Essens. 2013

Design: wppt:kommunikation gmbh

Süleyman Kayaalp, Beatrix Göge, wppt.de

Translation: Alison Gallup

Impressum

Contents

Introduction

Of Cavemen and Campfires

Invented Carrots

Potato Piracy

Potato + Poop = Europe

The Next Food Revolution

The book

The author

Introduction

To invent, Thomas Edison once remarked, you need “a good imagination and a pile of junk.” Seeing as the human race possesses inexhaustible quantities of both imagination and junk, it seems our inventiveness is boundless. But what was the greatest innovation in our history? One could hire technology sociologists or economic historians to wrestle with this question. The British retailer Tesco chose a different path: it asked people. By conducting a large-scale representative survey the company sought to find out what people in 2010 thought were the most important inventions of all time.

The more than four thousand Britons surveyed put the good old wheel at number one. The airplane took second place, followed by the light bulb (3), the Internet (4), and the computer (5). That these inventions were chosen for the top spots makes a certain amount of sense, as does the high regard for the telephone (6) or penicillin (7). That the iPhone (8), however, is more important than the washing machine (12) is something that can only be claimed by those who have never soaked their shirts in a boiling tub of water and then hand-scrubbed them clean on a washboard.

There have been other similar polls—and gadgets and computers always do extremely well. But why do so many Silicon Valley innovations end up occupying the top spots on these lists? It’s because for most of us the idea of innovation has become synonymous with computers and the Internet. Over the past years these inventions have changed our lives dramatically: we’ve watched as the Web has shattered the music industry, brought the retail sector to the brink of collapse, and turned many other aspects of our world inside out. Because we’ve had these personal experiences we have a tendency to overvalue the more recent inventions in our history. It’s why we consider e-mail (27) to be more groundbreaking than the chair (67), and Google (25) to be more important than matches (49). But our high-tech fixation is not only nonsense, it may even be dangerous: our silicon obsession obscures our view of many other worthwhile inventions. Our passion for smartphones or Facebook causes us to overlook the ideas that transformed our society in the past and have the potential to radically reshape it in the future.

If we want to see the next big thing coming we should spend more time looking to the left, to the right, and especially behind us, to the past. This essay is intended as a modest contribution to this and focuses attention on an area most of us would not associate with the concept “invention”: our food. We view its existence as God-given—as God-given as that of chairs or matches. But the food we eat has not been around since day one; we humans had to invent it first. The combination of food and ingenuity upended our world— and there are strong indications it will do so in the future as well.