Ha-Joon Chang is an exceptional academic - unique contributions, excellent storyteller, interdisciplinary approaches, and in this book appetizing: "Edible Economics: The World in 17 Dishes" (2022). This book was not written for academics, but everyday readers who might get pulled into economics, history and politics via food. This book is an easy and enjoyable read (~160 pages), and he continues his typical myth-busting style throughout. Reflecting on my notes, seems I was more interested in Chang's "greens" than the "ice cream" (see first quote below):

"With this book, I'm trying to make economics more palatable by serving it with stories about food. But be warned. The food stories are mostly not about the economics of food - how it is grown, processed, branded, sold, bought and consumed. These aspects are not usually central to the economic stories I have for you. And there are lots of interesting books about them around. My food stories are a bit like the ice cream that some of your moms may have offered to bribe you to eat your greens - except that in this book ice cream comes first, the greens later…" (p. xxv)

"It is a complete myth that people in poor countries, many of which are in the tropics, lack in terms of work ethic. In fact, they work much harder than their counterparts in rich countries. To begin with, usually a much higher proportion of the working age population is working in poor countries than in rich ones. According to data from the World Bank, in 2019, the labor force participation was 83% in Tanzania, 77% in Vietnam and 67% in Jamaica, compared to 60% in Germany, 61% in the US and 63% in South Korea, the supposed nation of workaholics." (p. 24)

"There was much criticism of these policies, not just outside but also inside Japan. Critics pointed out that Japan would be better off if it just imported things like steel and automobiles and concentrated on making things like silk and other textile products, which it was good at. If you protect your inefficient producers of, say, passenger cars (like Toyota and Nissan) by imposing tariffs on foreign cars, consumers either have to pay more than the world market price to get better cars from abroad or drive inferior and uglier Japanese cars, they pointed out. Also, by artificially channeling bank loans into inefficient industries, like automobile production, through government directives, they added, you are taking away funds from efficient industries, like silk, that could be using the same amount of capital to produce far more output. This is an absolutely correct argument - if you take a country's capabilities as a producer as given. However, in the long run, a country can change its productive capabilities and become better at things at which it is not good at today." (p. 43)

"Countries have required MNCs to transfer technology to their subsidiaries or put ceilings on the royalty they can charge for licensing their technologies to the subsidiaries. They have sometimes mandated MNCs to hire more than a certain proportion of the locals in the workforce, or to train workers they hire. To maximize the indirect benefits of MNC investments, they have required the MNC subsidiaries to buy more than a certain proportion of their inputs from local suppliers - this is known as the 'local contents requirement'. These policies were used extensively - and successfully - by countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Finland between the end of the Second World War and the 1980s." (p. 84)

"… the best economists should be, like the best of the cooks, able to combine different theories to have a more balanced view. They understand both the power and the limitations of the market, while knowing that entrepreneurs are the most successful when supported and suitably regulated by the state. They should be willing to combine individualist theories and socialist (or, more broadly, collectivist) theories - and augment them with theories of human capabilities - in order to come up with a more rounded view on issues like inequality, care work and the welfare state." (p. 161-162) 

The American Anthropologist Sidney Mintz (1922-2015) spent a career understanding and writing about the intersections between food, slavery and colonialism, largely in the Caribbean. His book Sweetness and Power (1985) is one of the most widely read and influential books in cultural anthropology. Mintz takes Anthropologists to task for often being ahistorical, in the introduction to Sweetness and Power he writes: "By some strange sleight of hand, one anthropological monograph after another whisks out of view any signs of the present and how it came to be" (p. xxvii). And: "I believe that without history its [Anthropology] explanatory power is seriously compromised. Social phenomena are by their nature historical, which is to say that the relationship among events is one "moment" can never be abstracted from their past and future settings" (p. xxx). His one was one of the many voices that helped steer social science research to be more integrated and interdisciplinary, highlighting the short-sightedness of disciplinary-specific research.

Mintz powerfully integrates the history of food, particularly that of the exploited and the powerful, into his book about sugar. For example: "millions of human beings were treated as commodities. To obtain them, products were shipped to Africa; by their labor power, wealth was created in the Americas. The wealth they created mostly returned to Britain; the products they made were consumed in Britain; and the products made by Britons – cloth, tools, torture instruments – were consumed by slaves who were themselves consumed in the creation of wealth" (p. 43).

Yet, it was not just anthropology, history and food studies that Mintz brings together, he also weaves in economics: "the rise of capitalism involved the destruction of economic systems that had preceded it – notably, European feudalism – and the creation of a system of world trade. It also involved the creation of colonies, the establishment of experimental economic enterprises in various world areas, and the development of new forms of slave-based production in the New World, using imported slaves – perhaps Europe's biggest single external contribution to its own economic growth" (p. 55). Importantly, however, Mintz does not leave history in the past, he connects the past to the present:

• "As the slaves were freed (by Demark in 1848, England in 1834-38, France in 1848, Netherlands in 1863, Puerto Rico in 1873-76, Cube in 1884), on the one hand, competition from imported contracted laborers forced the freedmen to work harder for less money; on the other, since access to idle land and other resources was shut off, the freedmen were prevented from developing alternative sources of livelihood. In effect, the planter classes sought to re-create pre-emancipation conditions – to replace the discipline of slavery with the discipline of hunger." (p. 70)
  

Sugar, however, was not only a story of exploitation and oppression. It is also a story of powerfulness. Mintz introduces the reasons why and how sugar consumption became a daily habit, further driving the demand for the commodity: "I have stressed sugar's usefulness as a mark of rank – to validate one's social position, to elevate others, or to define them as inferior. Whether as a medicine, a spice, or a preservative, and particularly in the public display epitomized by the subtleties, sugar uses were molded into declarative, hierarchical functions" (p. 139). At the same time, sugar's tool of the elite, and its consumption replicated by broader society, had negative impacts. Mintz also suggests these have been, and continue to be, purposeful tools:

• "Maldistribution of food within poor families may constitute a kind of culturally legitimized population control, since it systematically deprives the children of protein. "There are great cogent but not publicly articulated arguments against devoting scarce resources to infant and child nutrition. In oversimplified terms, death to preschool children due to malnutrition is de facto the most widely used method of population control." It is painfully easy to see how sucrose could be used in such a system of "population control." The Reagan administration's attempt to define sucrose-rich catsup as a "vegetable" in federally supported school lunch programs is a recent demonstration." (p. 149).
  

Returning to Anthropology, Mintz uses his study to reflect on society writ large: "The experience of time in modern society is often one of an insoluble shortage, and this perception may be essential to the smooth functioning of an economic system based on the principle of ever-expanded consumption. Anthropologists and economists have struggled with the paradox implicit in modern society – that its vastly more productive technologies result in individuals having (or feeling they have) less time, rather than more." (p. 202)