Overview

Why Everything Is Trying to Rot Food does not want to last. This is not a moral failing, a design flaw, or a conspiracy by nature. It is simply the default state of matter once it has stopped being alive and started being useful. The moment food is harvested, hunted, cooked, or otherwise separated from the system that sustained it, the countdown begins. Enzymes begin undoing careful biological structures. Oxygen starts reacting with exposed molecules. Microorganisms, which have been patiently waiting everywhere at all times, notice an opportunity and move in. Nothing hostile is required. Rot is not an attack. It is gravity for groceries. From nature's perspective, food spoiling is success. It means nutrients are being recycled, energy is moving again, and life is continuing its long habit of eating yesterday. From the human perspective, however, spoilage is inconvenient at best and catastrophic at worst. Hunger does not care that decomposition is natural. Winter does not accept explanations. Neither do long journeys, unexpected droughts, sieges, market failures, shipping delays, or Tuesdays when you forgot to go shopping. Preservation exists because humans live in the gap between when food is available and when food is needed-and that gap is where everything goes wrong. This book is about the many ways humans have tried to stretch that gap without poisoning themselves in the process.

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