How Things Are Made: A Journey Through the Hidden World of Manufacturing

In this entertaining debut report, Minshall, an innovation professor at the University of Cambridge, delves into the complex systems that produce the world’s goods and transport them to market. Minshall details the manufacturing processes for myriad products, describing, for instance, how making toilet paper involves cutting down trees with tractor-like harvesting machines and shredding them into wood chips that are transformed into pulp by heat and chemicals before getting “sprayed” onto wire mesh and drying as paper. “Manufacturing... is about making trade-offs,” he contends, discussing how one Premier Foods factory produces more than 250,000 cherry Bakewell tarts per day by sacrificing the ability to make a diverse range of goods for more efficiently creating a single product in high quantities. Tracing recent trends in manufacturing and logistics, Minshall notes that Covid-era supply chain disruptions have renewed interest in moving factories closer to consumers, describing how the difficulties of keeping Covid vaccines refrigerated during transportation led some pharmaceutical companies to cram equipment into shipping containers that allow scientists to make vaccines on-site wherever infrastructure can’t support cold storage. The complicated hidden backstories of ordinary items fascinate, and the conversational prose keeps the narrative moving even through involved logistical discussions. This will satisfy anyone who’s ever wondered where their favorite products come from. Agent: Laura Macdougall, United Agents. (May)