In the 1980s, a significant shift occurred in global food production, allowing the average person to access enough calories for the first time in history. Charles C. Mann explores how innovations from the Green Revolution, particularly advances in fertilization, irrigation, and genetics, transformed farming practices and reshaped our relationship with food.
… the Haber–Bosch process, as it is called, was arguably the most important technological development of the twentieth century, and one of the most consequential human inventions of any time. It made it possible to win “bread from air,” as the German physicist Max von Laue wrote in an obituary of Haber.
France today is famed for its great cuisine and splendid restaurants. But its people did not reach the level of 2,000 to 2,500 calories per day until the mid-1800s. And even as the French left famine in the rear-view mirror, starvation was still claiming hundreds of thousands of Irish, Scots, and Belgians. As late as the winter of 1944–45, the Netherlands suffered a crippling famine — the Hongerwinter. More than 20,000 people perished in just a few months. Food shortages plagued rural Spain and Italy until at least the 1950s.