Our species long lived on the edge of starvation. Now we produce enough food for all 7 billion of us to eat nearly 3,000 calories every day. This is such an astonishing thing in the history of life as to verge on the miraculous. "The Big Ratchet" is the story of how it happened, of the ratchetsthe technologies and innovations, big and smallthat propelled our species from hunters and gatherers on the savannahs of Africa to shoppers in the aisles of the supermarket.
The Big Ratchet itself came in the twentieth century, when a range of technologiesfrom fossil fuels to scientific plant...