Food and Civilization: a Global History of Empires Shaping Culinary Customs
About This Novel
The author tells the story of the rise and fall of the world's major diets, from the mastery of grain cooking some 20,000 years ago to the present. Through the apparent jumble of diverse diets, the author reveals the underlying simplicity of a culinary genealogy, illustrating how cyclical changes in culinary philosophy about health, economics, politics, society, and belief in the gods drove the creation of new diets, some of which were chosen as imperial diets and came to dominate the world. The authors also illustrate how traders, missionaries, and armies moved diets across mountains, oceans, deserts, and political borders. This book's innovative narrative considers cooking, like language, clothing, or architecture, as a human creation. By emphasizing how cooking transforms produce into food and using the global rather than a specific country as the stage, it challenges the agrarian and romantic myths that underpin the contemporary food movement.
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