It’s not just jobs and pensions and mortgages that are determined by economic factors. 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.

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. Almost everyone is interested in food, but many people find that economics are too dry, difficult, and technical. I almost bribe my reader to get interested in economics. I transform the food stories into economic stories. 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 open every chapter with some story about the food item after which the chapter is titled. How do you use food to explain economics? Great food often involves fermentation, maturity, and slow cooking, so I think that the book has become better for it. Of course, economics also matured in that time. Since then, I got to visit 20 or so new countries, so my food experiences were vastly expanded. 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. For one reason or another, I never got to write this book until couple of years ago.

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. An edited version of the conversation follows. Chang believes that democracy is meaningless in a capitalist economy if not everyone understands basic economics, so he’s using stories about food from around the world to make economic theory more consumable. In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey Global Publishing’s Raju Narisetti chats with Ha-Joon Chang, an institutional economist and professor at SOAS University of London, about his new book, Edible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains the World (PublicAffairs, January 2023).

A hungry economist explains the world