A PARADOX OF today's industrial agriculture: we produce ever greater amounts of calories but declining levels of nutrients. This is one of the more sobering revelations of Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture, by E.N. Anderson (NYU Press, $20), though the book is a brief masterpiece of revelation, knitting the story of food from threads of culture, politics, religion, ecology, and business. Anderson (an anthropology professor at UC Riverside) bucks the current tide of monographs (on honey and chocolate, to name recent examples) by making himself master of all he surveys, which is very nearly everything. The book is both broad and deep, and its modest size is deceptive, for there are several startling facts and observations on nearly every page.

Few of these, though, are as important as the severing of the relation between calories and nutrition, which we have unhappily accomplished by the monocultural production of what Anderson calls "bulk staples" – in the American case, white flour, refined sugar, and highly processed oils – and whose unhappy results are visible all around us as obesity, diabetes, and coronary disease. Early in the book Anderson notes, rather shockingly, that members of hunter-gatherer societies ate a healthier and more balanced diet than do their successors in the human pageant, the people of agricultural societies. Although we are inclined these days to blame agribusiness and global capitalism for our growing food-related woes, Anderson suggests that orderly cultivation, by its nature, has long tended to eliminate variety, to our detriment.

There has been so much food despair published in the past few years that the partly cloudy skies of Everybody Eats seem remarkably cheery. Yes, he says, disaster could strike, imminently: "The holocaust produced by the meteorite that ended the dinosaurs, even the Permian extinction event that wiped out more than 90 percent of all living species, are dwarfed by the horrors to come within the present century – unless humans change their ways." And while he sees "few signs of hope in the world's current political system ... whose leaders are fighting against even the most token restrictions on devastation and pollution," nonetheless "human are surprising animals. When the leaders fail, ordinary people take over." Commoners might not start foolish wars or attempt to dismantle the political institutions that serve and protect liberal societies, they might be nameless, but they understand in a way the great never will that food is, and will be forevermore, "inseparable from emotion and meaning."

Contact Paul Reidinger at paulr@sfbg.com.