Food Canning Technology Book

Trying to supplement my knowledge of food history for my Survey of Food History course this semester, I greatly enjoyed Fernandez-Armesto's account, which organizes the vast details of world food history into eight compelling categories:

1) The Invention of Cooking, arguably the "first revolution" of human eating and a key step in our evolution and survival

2) The Meaning of Eating, revealing how meals and specific foods were the first building blocks of cultures, traditions, taboos, mores, etc.

3) Breeding to Eat, discussing the role of herding, i.e. transitioning from hunter-gatherer patterns of collecting food to producing food

4) Managing Plant Life for Food, which my professor, Ken Albala, has argued as another key revolution in food history, this time, the agricultural revolution

5) Food and Rank, revealing the stratifying and organizing power of food to create and reinforce inequality by development of haute cuisine, which in socially mobile societies is observed and copied by the middle class

6) Exchange of Cultures, discussing the initial barriers to cross-cultural cuisines, as well as the salt and spice trade

7) Food and Ecological Exchange, namely as influenced by the Columbian exchange that facilitated the transport of Old and New World foods

8) Industrial Food in the 19th and 20th Centuries, discussed both the pros and cons of the industrial system, and calling for the next food revolution to undue some of the harm that the green revolution of agricultural has caused

I really enjoyed it and found it to be a concise and intriguing presentation of the history of food across the globe.