GloBEERrization

Christopher Mark O'Brien, Fermenting Revolution: How to Drink Beer and Save the World. New Society Publishers, 2006.

The author says that he likes to drink beer and he wants to save the world and so, naturally, the result is a book about how to drink beer and save the world. It's a clever idea, although I don't think the book itself is quite as clever as the idea of the book, if you know what I mean. Read this book and you will learn a lot about beer, its history and social significance. Maybe more than you want to know, unless you are really into beer, but interesting nonetheless.

I was drawn to the book by the obvious connection between beer and globalization. Beer is a pretty good example of how the paradox of globalization works. On one hand, industrial brewing is becoming more and more concentrated in the hands of a few global beer conglomerates, with predictable result: an ocean of Bud. At the same time, however, global networks have encouraged the growth of local microbreweries, islands of quality in that tasteless sea. I wish the author had developed this angle a bit more, but I understand that he was actually more interested in saving the world than writing about globalization.

So how do you save the world by drinking beer? There's actually a checklist of 24 things you can do provided at the end of the book. Drink local (of course), keep your refrigerator full (saves energy), recycle your empty bottles, and so on. Thanks to Johanna Wallner for suggesting this title to me.

The Sushi Economy

Sasha Issenberg, The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy. Gotham Books, 2007.

The premise of this book is that sushi -- the famous Japanese seasoned rice and raw fish delicacy -- exists on two levels. It is, of course, a food that is very local, with a particular set of cultural practices and a specialized vocabulary. To step into a sushi bar is to step out of wherever you happen to be and into a small piece of a particular image of Japan.

Chances are, however, that the "local" culture that you experience is in fact the product of rather sophisticated global markets and processes, which is why sushi can now be found all over the world. The "slow food" that is prepared before your eyes exists because of a "fast world" of markets and technology.

Sasha Issenberg does a great job of telling the story of globalization through the specific case of sushi. We learn, though the sort of first person reporting familiar to readers of The New Yorker, how Atlantic bluefin tuna came to Japanese fish markets (Japanese airlines needed something to fill their cargo holds on the return trips to Japan), how the famous Tokyo fish markets work, and how Croatian immigrants to Australia learned to farm tuna to satisfy sushi diners in Japan and elsewhere.

Along the way we al,so learn a lot about how fish is caught or farmed, bought and sold, prepared and consumed. And, since this is the story of the sushi economy, not just sushi, we learn about the costs of catching fish and economics of running a sushi restaurant.

A fascinating book for readers who want to know how globalization works in a particular case. I would rank it with Pietra Rivoli's Travels of a T-Shirt and Marc Levinson's The Box as among my favorite books about globalization in action.