Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food

Fast Food Nation meets Guns, Germs, and Steel in this brilliant account of the history of food.When eating escargots de Bourgogne at a three-star restaurant, you are consuming the world's oldest "cattle": Snails have been bred for food for more than 5,000 years, everywhere from Sumeria to ancient Rome to prehistoric Scotland. The nutmeg sprinkled on your eggnog was, once upon a time, the object of war between the Dutch and English. The oysters with which your meal began are, uniquely, eaten uncooked and unkilled...a food that unites you with your Neolithic ancestors.These are a sampling of the remarkable connections found in Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's newest and most entertaining work yet, the story of the eight great revolutions in the history of food, from the origins of cooking to the inception of herding and agriculture to the industrialization and globalization of food. Because cuisine is a -- perhaps the -- defining characteristic of a culture, Near a Thousand Tables is a sampler of civilizations; because we meet our environment most intimately when we eat, this is an exploration in historical ecology. Because cooks were the first chemists, this is a history of science. Above all, perhaps, because food is universally appealing and irresistibly topical, this is unashamedly a book of human pleasures.Boldly conceived, the work of a brilliant scholar who is "dazzlingly erudite" (Boston Globe), "contentious and provocative" (The Independent), "as icnonoclastic as he is ambitious" (The New York Times Book Review), Near a Thousand Tables is a remarkable achievement.