Food History
Interested in culinary history and the story of why we eat what we eat? Read on!
100 million years of food : what our ancestors ate and why it matters today
Le, Stephen, author
2016
Animal, vegetable, junk : a history of food, from sustainable to suicidal
Bittman, Mark, author
2021
The history of Homo sapiens is usually told as a story of technology or economics. But there is a more fundamental driver: food. How we hunted and gathered explains our emergence as a new species and our earliest technology; our first food systems, from fire to agriculture, tell where we settled and how civilizations expanded. The quest for food for growing populations drove exploration, colonialism, slavery, even capitalism. New styles of agriculture and food production have written a new chapter of human history, one that's driving both climate change and global health crises.
Canadians at table : food, fellowship, and folklore : a culinary history of Canada
Duncan, Dorothy
2011
Candy : a century of panic and pleasure
Kawash, Samira, 1963-
2013
"A lively cultural history that explains how candy became more like food and food more like candy"-- Provided by publisher.
The cooking gene : a journey through African American culinary history in the Old South
Twitty, Michael, 1977- author
2017
Empires of food : feast, famine, and the rise and fall of civilization
Frase, Evan D. G.
2010
This sweeping, guns, germs, and steel-like history reveals the root cause of the rise and fall of all the great civilizations around the world - food. Using the colourful diaries of a sixteenth-century merchant as a narrative guide, "Empires of Food" vividly chronicles the fate of foods, people, and societies for the past 12,000 years - and what to expect in years to come.
Lost feast : culinary extinction and the future of food
Newman, Lenore, 1973- author
2019
Food expert Lenore Newman sets out to look at the history of the foods we have loved to death and what that means for the culinary paths we choose for the future. Bracketing the chapters that look at the history of our relationship to specific foods, Lenore enlists her ecologist friend and fellow cook, Dan, in a series of "extinction dinners" designed to recreate meals of the past or to illustrate how we might be eating in the future. Part culinary romp, part environmental wake-up call, this book makes a critical contribution to our understanding of food security today.
Meathooked : the history and science of our 2.5-million-year love affair with meat
Zaraska, Marta.
2016
Menus from history. Volume 1 : historic meals and recipes for every day of the year
Clarkson, Janet, 1947-
2009
The omnivore's dilemma : a natural history of four meals
Pollan, Michael, author
2007
What should we have for dinner? The question has confronted us since man discovered fire, but according to Michael Pollan, the bestselling author of The Botany of Desire, how we answer it today, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, may well determine our very survival as a species. Should we eat a fast-food hamburger? Something organic? Or perhaps something we hunt, gather, or grow ourselves? The omnivore’s dilemma has returned with a vengeance, as the cornucopia of the modern American supermarket and fast-food outlet confronts us with a bewildering and treacherous food landscape. What’s at stake in our eating choices is not only our own and our children’s health, but the health of the environment that sustains life on earth.
The restaurant : a 2,000-year history of dining out
Sitwell, William (William Ronald Sacheverell)
2020
An award-winning food critic explores the history of dining out, from the taverns of Pompeii, through the emergence of fine dining during the French Revolution, and identifies the ten most influential restaurant dishes of all time.
Sugar : a bittersweet history
Abbott, Elizabeth.
2005
Impressively researched and commandingly written, this thoroughly engaging book follows the history of sugar to the present day. It is a revealing look at how sugar changed the nature of meals, fuelled the Industrial Revolution, generated a brutal new form of slavery, and jumpstarted the fast-food revolution.
The taste of empire : how Britain's quest for food shaped the modern world
Collingham, E. M. (Elizabeth M.), author
2017