The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in economics, business, food, history, sociology, culinary history, and related subjects.

Edible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains the World is by Professor Ha-Joon Chang, who teaches economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University of London, the United Kingdom.

The TU Library collection includes many other books about different aspects of the economics of food.

The publisher’s description reads:

For decades, a single free market philosophy has dominated global economics. But this is bland and unhealthy – like British food in the 1980s, when bestselling author and economist Ha-Joon Chang first arrived in the UK from South Korea. Just as eating a wide range of cuisines contributes to a more interesting and balanced diet, so too is it essential we listen to a variety of economic perspectives.

In Edible Economics, Chang makes challenging economic ideas more palatable by plating them alongside stories about food from around the world. He uses histories behind familiar food items – where they come from, how they are cooked and consumed, what they mean to different cultures – to explore economic theory. For Chang, chocolate is a life-long addiction, but more exciting are the insights it offers into post-industrial knowledge economies; and while okra makes Southern gumbo heart-meltingly smooth, it also speaks of capitalism’s entangled relationship with freedom and unfreedom. Explaining everything from the hidden cost of care work to the misleading language of the free market as he cooks dishes like anchovy and egg toast, Gambas al Ajillo and Korean dotori mook, Ha-Joon Chang serves up an easy-to-digest feast of bold ideas.

Myth-busting, witty and thought-provoking, Edible Economics shows that getting to grips with the economy is like learning a recipe: if we understand it, we can change it – and, with it, the world.

Professor Chang told an interviewer in January 2023: 

My two greatest passions are food and economics, and I thought that this book was a natural pairing of two things that I dearly love. For one reason or another, I never got to write this book until couple of years ago.

However, I’m glad that I wrote it when I wrote it because I made a quick calculation and realized that since 2006, I must have had over 16,000 meals. Since then, I got to visit 20 or so new countries, so my food experiences were vastly expanded. Of course, economics also matured in that time. Great food often involves fermentation, maturity, and slow cooking, so I think that the book has become better for it.

I open every chapter with some story about the food item after which the chapter is titled. It could be about the history of that particular food item; it could be about the relationship between that food item and myself; it could be some important historical event that revolved around that food item. I transform the food stories into economic stories.

I almost bribe my reader to get interested in economics. Almost everyone is interested in food, but many people find that economics are too dry, difficult, and technical. So I’m trying to lure my readers into the book by telling them interesting stories about food and then making that transition into economic arguments.

To put it very bluntly, I believe that, in a capitalist economy, unless everyone understands some economics, democracy is meaningless because so many of our decisions are bound up in economic equations. It’s not just jobs and pensions and mortgages that are determined by economic factors. These days, culture, education, and healthcare are also determined by economic factors.

Economics are everywhere, so if you don’t understand economics, you actually don’t know what you’re voting for. If you remember back in 2000, when George W. Bush was elected US president, a lot of people apparently said that he looked like a guy they could have a beer with. That’s not a way to elect someone to the most powerful political office in the world. We need to learn economics not just to defend our society but also to shape our society according to our deeper values.

My book is trying to make a plea to everyone that they should take an interest in economics. It doesn’t matter if they find some of the arguments a bit tricky or unimportant. I think that people need to know the basics of economics in order to have a meaningful democracy.

In the 19th century, cotton and tobacco, which were mostly grown on plantations that held slaves, were the main exports of the United States. It was not an industrialized country; it was an agrarian economy. These two agriculture products alone provided up to 65 percent of US export earnings. Two-thirds of the exports were produced by slaves. Given this prevalence of unfree labor, first in the form of slavery and then in the form of indentured labor, it is quite ironic that freedom has become the central concept in the defense of capitalism by free-market economists.

The problem is that the notion of freedom that free-market economists use is too narrow and biased. First of all, the freedom they talk about is only economic freedom, not political freedom, social freedom, or cultural freedom. They believe that these other freedoms should take a back seat when they clash with economic freedom.

Free-market economists have defined economic freedom very narrowly because, for them, the most important economic freedom is the freedom of the property owners to use their property as they see fit. If other economic freedoms—like the freedom of workers to strike—clash with the freedom of the property owners, they believe priority should be given to the property owners.

The relationship between capitalism and freedom has been conflicted and sometimes even contradictory. That’s very different from the story of ongoing freedom that free-market economists say capitalism brings to us.

We need to balance different types of freedom in order to have a balanced society. We need to balance different economic freedoms not just for property owners but for consumers and workers. Different economic actors have to have their freedom defended. Moreover, we need to build institutions to protect other freedoms. We need to have human-right laws.

Only when we balance these different types of freedoms will we have a more balanced society or more humane form of capitalism. I don’t believe that there’s just one kind of capitalism. There are many different kinds, and we can make institutional changes to make capitalism more humane.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)