The modern ‘Western Diet’ – one dependent on animal proteins, processed grains and sugar – dominates the world. This food system produces abundance and waste; it meets nutritional needs for hundreds of millions while creating new types of health concerns and epidemics; and it fosters local cultures and consumer tastes while giving rise to ecological devastation. In his wide-ranging book, Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology, Chris Otter dives deep into the historical foundations of this paradoxical diet. He explores how Britain, between 1820 and 1914, became the architect of a global agro-industrial food system that took over the world. This planetary system was partly the project of political economy and Britain's position as a global and colonial power. However, power also resided in distributed infrastructures, technologies, dispositions and subjectivities around food. The notion of ‘cheap food’ became part of British consumer rituals, in recurring purchases of roast beef and loaves of white bread.
The core problem that Otter dissects is how something so personal – feeding families, satiating bodies and assembling tastes – can be networked into world ecology and geopolitical struggles. This ‘large planet philosophy’ imprinted human consumerism onto the earth. To demonstrate this connectivity, Otter himself becomes a connector. He links history, philosophy, geography, urban studies, STS, ecology and evolutionary biology, while drawing on thousands of primary sources, including medical journals, industry textbooks, parliamentary reports, memoirs, cattle breeding manuals and newspapers. The result is a tour de force of historical inquiry, unpacking layers and levels of events, actors, innovations and materials.
Although meat, wheat and sugar have their own logics of development and expansion, common elements unfolded across them. Biology, technology and infrastructure were marshalled to solve consumer and industry problems. Meat, for instance, was built into cultural understandings of manliness and progress, even before it became part of Britain's political ecological machinery. ‘Backwardness’ was linked to ‘meatlessness’, and a ‘meat famine’ pushed Britain to find new ways to address demand. Over time, producers were distanced from consumers, erasing ethical considerations about livestock as living beings. Otter details the gruesome backstage technology of slaughter, of experimentation with modalities of killing, from bolts through animals’ skulls to guillotines, gassing and electrocution. The industrial work of raising and slaughtering cattle was ultimately moved away from dense neighbourhoods, out of perceptual view of consumers.
Similar institutional logics arose in wheat and sugar markets. For meat, the issues were breeding, landscape, slaughter, refrigeration and spoilage in search of settling on the right qualities and locations to raise Hereford cattle. For wheat, the issues were selection criteria, hybridization and plant breeding to locate the best combination of colour, gluten, yield and traits for pest resistance and industrial baking. Sugar came with similar scenarios, especially as beet sugar replaced cane sugar. Why sugar from white Silesian beets, but not varieties of carrots, apples or grapes? Beets were shown to have similar qualities of crystallization, comparable extraction processes and chemical likeness.
Industries deconstructed animals and plants into ‘fat, protein, bran, germ, skin, [and] bones’ to enable industrial products to traverse geographic boundaries and feed a nation (p. 100). The industrial infrastructural connectivity also relied on a triple politics of food risk, violence and bodily metabolism. Distance erased the perception of ethical considerations about animals’ lives, but it also created new debates about food safety and inequality. Global shipping, adulteration and processing altered the materiality of products leading to major contamination events, everything from arsenic poisoning to rust in canned food. Global trade exposed people to epizootics and parasites, raising new questions about freedom of markets versus freedom from disease.
While this large planet philosophy secured foodstuff for most British consumers, global development created new kinds of food inequalities: geopolitical famine response, uneven metabolic pathways and the rise of the Western Diet as a ‘master pathology’. Britain, through the soft force of food, pushed economic liberalism into peasant societies. As famine conditions worsened and people suffered, the British mainland saw opportunities to convert Ireland into an agrarian hinterland for their own meat consumption rather than solve food security crises. In India, granaries and irrigation systems were destroyed, leading famine and drought to plague populations even as railroad infrastructures generated new markets for Indian-grown grains. Inequities in health and consumption did not completely escape the British mainland either, where men and women were introduced to different diets, nutrients and metabolic outcomes.
Otter's dual focus on world ecology and British consumer culture illustrates the push and pull of global development through food, operating as spatial expansion and cultural localization. He shows how incremental strategies accumulated into worldwide interdependencies and social inequalities. In this regard, Otter expertly demonstrates how to study a world system, not as a top-down geopolitical project, but rather as evolving socio-material relationships and political-economic struggles. The result is a treasure trove of historical discovery about the unfolding complexity of power and culture in the context of industrial capitalism.
