Near a Thousand Tables
Every ingredient of our past and present can be read off our plates: our identity, our place in society and the place of our society in the world. In Near a Thousand Tables, Oxford historian Felipe Fernndez-Armesto, author of Civilizations, tells the fascinating story of food as cultural as well as culinary history-ecology as well as gastronomy. Because cuisine is a-perhaps the-defining characteristic of a culture, Near a Thousand Tables is a sampler of civilizations; even more, it is an exploration in historical ecology, and even of the history of science.Above all, perhaps, because food is universally appealing, this is always-even at its most instructive-unashamedly a book about the pleasures of eating ....pleasures that have been immortalized by everyone from Homer to M. F. K. Fisher.