If you like the title of The Story of Food in the Human Past: How What We Ate Made Us Who We Are, you will probably like the book very much. Robyn Cutright is an excellent writer, and the stories she tells in this book are fascinating. If you are someone who reads the title and says, “Wait—one single story of food in the past? Who is ‘us’?” then you may not appreciate it. The book's title aligns reasonably well with its contents, and Cutright's efforts to streamline “food in the human past” (australopiths through the nineteenth century AD, biological and cultural entanglements, potables and solid foods, psychoactive and nonpsychoactive substances) to fit into 205 pages (plus 60 pages of endnotes and bibliography) will not suit everyone.

In The Story of Food, Cutright seeks to answer two questions: “How did food shape us as humans?” and “What role did food play in past societies?” (pp. 18–19). She consequently divides the book into two sections. Part I discusses pre-Holocene hominin evolution, emphasizing biological adaptations but not ignoring culture. Not every species discussed is ancestral to modern humans (e.g., Paranthropus robustus), and not all hominin species are discussed (e.g., Homo floresiensis). Part II explores key themes in more recent prehistory, with chapters on domestication, feasting, status and power, sacred meals, and quotidian gender and identity.

There are costs as well as benefits to telling big and exciting stories such as “how food made us who we are.” One cost is that every Big Development in the story requires explanation before an author can discuss food's role(s) in it. Pages need to be spent characterizing various hominin taxa in order to report their inferred diets, for example. Limited space can, however, be allotted to each development, so nothing can be explored in too much detail. Covering global agricultural origins—why, who, where, when, and inferred consequences—in 25 pages means making some very difficult choices about which regions, foods, and production strategies to include (here, coverage is focused on southwest Asia/Europe and Mexico/southeastern United States). Cutright acknowledges complexities and topics that she does not have the space to explore, providing more than seven pages of endnotes for that 25-page chapter. Whether readers find this approach compelling will depend on whether they prefer a (nicely framed) window onto the topic or seek globally inclusive understandings of it. Another cost is that because none of us can specialize in everything, discoveries outside of our areas of expertise are very easy to overlook. There are, for example, stone artifacts that predate 2.6 million years ago, and these artifacts are not primarily choppers (cf. pp. 42–44). In their 2015 Nature article “3.3-Million-Year-Old Stone Tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya,” Sonia Harmand and colleagues characterize the earliest currently known lithic artifacts as cores and flakes.

Part II of the book is stronger than Part I. Cutright wrangles interestingly with various topics; the chapters on ritual consumption and on gender and identity—which include engrossing examples from her work in the prehispanic Andes—are my favorites of the book. More importantly, most of Part II's chapters are organized by theme rather than by evolutionary sequences and processes. This thematic organization allows Cutright to avoid inherently controversial choices about which areas and cultures to include in discussions of global human “progress.” We step away from the minefields of “what we ate” and how it “made us who we are” [italics mine], where omission of any global region causes discomfort, and into conversations where individual case studies need not bear the weight of all humanity. Scholars will still disagree about specific choices (What is feasting? Is Jack Goody's characterization of elite cuisine a good model for archaeology?), but such disagreements are fertile ground for conversation both inside classrooms and between scholarly colleagues.

The Story of Food in the Human Past has endnotes rather than in-text citations or footnotes, which contributes to its being a propulsive read, but this format also requires readers to flip constantly to the back of the book to identify sources and check for perspectives not covered in the main text. Consequently, the layout echoes the text in moving many complexities to behind the scenes. Readers can decide for themselves whether they prefer smooth and relatively unilinear narratives such as this one or bumpier ones that highlight diverse trajectories and scholarly debates.