An Edible History of Humanity

Tom Standage is a British journalist and author. Born in 1969, Standage grew up in South East London and studied engineering and computing at Oxford University. Standage began working for The Economist in 1998 as a science correspondent and is now deputy director of the newspaper. He has also written for several other publications, such as the New York Times, Wired, and The Guardian. In addition to An Edible History of Humanity, Standage has written seven books, including The Victorian Internet (1998) and A History of the World in 6 Glasses (2005).

Much of Standage’s writing utilizes a microhistorical approach—centering on one aspect or one point in history and exploring it in full. Standage’s first work, The Neptune File: A Story of Astronomical Rivalry and the Pioneers of Planet Hunting (2001), describes how astronomer Urbain Le Verrier and mathematician John Couch Adams calculated the existence of Neptune. The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine (2003) tells the true story of a mechanical man called “The Turk” that was engineered using clockwork techniques. The 18th-century nobleman Baron Wolfgang von Kempelin created the mechanical man, dubbing it “The Turk,” and traveled with it across Europe while challenging people to best it at chess.