In All You Can Eat, Linda McQuaig assembles an impressive indictment of the prevailing economic system. By defining and demystifying the terms, naming the suspects (individuals, institutions, and ideologies), and providing a credible historical and political context, she makes a clear case for the criminal injustices that are levied in the name of the global economy.

At the centre of her investigation is the late Karl Polanyi, an influential yet largely overlooked economic historian and anthropologist who repudiated the popular claim (by capitalists and Marxists alike) that human beings are motivated mainly by personal economic or material gain. Polanyi contended rather that personal gain was a factor, not the factor, and that overriding this compulsion was a natural desire for relative (or communal) well-being. McQuaig explores these and other concepts of this progressive thinker, and All You Can Eat is in part a brief but alluring biography of this revolutionary figure.

McQuaig brings her persuasive anthropological insight to bear on individual and societal conditions and their ever-changing relationship to prevailing market forces. Especially powerful is her interpretation of the historical transition of land to real estate and the transformation of people into workers, and her analysis of how medieval societies maintained values of relatively moral economic decency that, ironically, seem progressive by today’s standards.

In clear and often polemical language, McQuaig calls to the stand the pundits and power-brokers who pledge allegiance to Homo economicus, picking apart their often self-serving arguments. All You Can Eat is a timely antidote to the World Bank economists who maintain, despite the indisputable worsening of environmental conditions and the decreasing overall living and labour standards worldwide, that capitalism improves the well-being of all.