The Story of Food

This book is an antidote to that ignorance. It is an essential contribution to the ongoing debate about how we eat now, and what and why and since when and for how much longer? It comes at this enormous subject in a multi-disciplinary blizzard of enthusiasm, like the great encyclopaedias of the Enlightenment, attacking food from historical, political, cultural, scientific and medical angles in ways that make it gripping as a sit down read, compulsive as an idle browse, and indispensable as a reference tool. And if you’re not a big reader, you’ll learn more from a flick through the dazzling images that illustrate it than you would from a thousand articles in the daily food press (apart from mine!). Find out how meat changed our brains, why having a walnut for a brain is no bad thing in Afghanistan and what the drains in Pompeii tell us about eating giraffes. But first I think it is time for what Winnie the Pooh called “a little smackerel of something” – Coco Pops and muesli I think, with just the lightest scattering of Ready Brek …