Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food

"In this book, I aim not to replace other histories of food but to offer readers a useful alternative: to take a genuinely global perspective; to treat food history as a theme of world history, inseparable from all the other interactions of human beings with one another and with the rest of nature; to treat evenhandedly the ecological, cultural and culinary concepts of the subject; to combine a broad conspectus with selectively detailed excursions into particular cases; to trace connections, at every stage, between the food of the past and the way we eat today; and to do all this briefly. . . One can philosophize quite well while preparing supper. I often say, when I have these little thoughts, "Had Aristotle cooked, be would bave written a great deal more." - Felipe Fernandez-Armesto