Reviews for Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food

The average rating for Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-08-20 00:00:00 Sean Mckiernan Positives: rambly accounts of food history, ecology, cultural and political significance, etc. Lots of great anecdotes - mozzarella from water buffalos! The chocolate bar invented partially as a temperance object to keep people from drinking! (Which sent me lunging for the internet to find out how long it took someone to invent chocolate liqueur. My faith in humanity is sustained by learning that alcoholic chocolate beverages actually predate the chocolate bar by nearly two centuries. Priorities, people). Negatives: Cheerful use of the phrase "cultural miscegenation," coupled with an occasionally . . . weird tone when discussing imperial and colonial relationships significant to food history. Cultural miscegenation? Seriously?

Review # 2 was written on 2012-02-20 00:00:00 Bertha Logan 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.