Near A Thousand Tables

2003 IACP Award Winner! Literary Category! Fast Food Nation meets Guns, Germs, and Steel in this brilliant account of the history of food. When eating escargot 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. The nutmeg you sprinkle on your eggnog was, one upon a time, the object of war between the Dutch and the English. These are a sampling of the remarkable connections found in this entertaining work--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 characterization of culture, Near A Thousand Tables, is a sampler of civilization; because we meet our environment most intimately when we eat, this is an exploration in historical ecology. Because cooks were the first chemist, 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.