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The Food Chronology: A Food Lover's Compendium of Events and Anecdotes, from Prehistory to the Present |
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The Food Chronology: A Food Lover's Compendium of Events and Anecdotes, from Prehistory to the Present |
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by: James Trager
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.09 EAN: 9780805052473 ISBN: 080505247X Label: Owl Books (NY) Languages: Manufacturer: Owl Books (NY) Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 800 Publication Date: 1997-06 Publisher: Owl Books (NY) Studio: Owl Books (NY) Editorial Review: Product Description: Published in hardcover to much acclaim, this winner of the IACP Julia Child Award for Best Food Reference presents a highly informative overview of the cultural development of food and food availability throughout human history. More than 13,000 entries in 27 specialized categories provide informative and entertaining facts about fast food, health food, supermarkets, etiquette, and more. 200 illustrations. Amazon.com Review: Fascinating food facts can be as appealing as mouth-watering recipes. Hence the allure of The Food Chronolgy: A Food Lover's Compendium of Events and Anecdotes, From Prehistory to the Present. From this tour de force, you learn when the first tuna was canned, the first Hershey Kiss introduced, and the first Baci candy made in Italy--all in 1909. In 1995, the hardcover edition of this paperback won the Julia Child Cookbook Award for Best Food Reference. This paperback edition, published in 1997, deluges you with the same information, including material on politics, art, economics, medicine, in all, a total of 50 fields, all related to food. On the down side, many facts lack a context or sufficient explanation to make them useful. Why, for example, did the Greeks get pepper from India in 431 B.C.? Trivia nuts will have a feast. Researchers may find this farrago of facts poorly organized when tracking information through time. Spotty indexing does not help. Overall, there is an abundance of information with little sense of its significance. Related Items:
Average Rating:
 Rating:  - A Useful, if Flawed Book Any serious student of food and food history will find a lot of errors and inadequacies in this book. Sometimes the material is just plain wrong. More often, the brief comments are just over-simplified: the section on Italy's D.O.C. laws is an example.Most of the problems are questions of emphasis: there are 25 entries for 'pasta' and none for 'soba'. None of the entries about wine mention the development of bottling, which is surely one of the most important innova tions. As other reviewers have observed, there is a disproportionate emphasis on America and Europe and the curious inclusion of many short- lived restaurants. So with all these cavils, what's the point of this book and why does it rate three stars? This books great virtue is as a corrective companion to all those histories that ignore food. If you believe that people follow their food and that nutrition and gastronomy often lie beneath the big topics in history, this is your book. What was going on in the world of food in 1776? 1812? How did salt cod and lime juice change the course of the European exploration of the rest of the world? This is history in a blink-without much sense of context and no report of the ideas about food that lurked behind the events. But it is a valuable dose of perspective and an excellent starting point. It is also, for those times and places where a quick browsing read is desireable, irreplaceable. My copy sits on a shelf near the rocker in my kitchen. Another chef of my acquaintance keeps his in the bathroom. As with so many things, this book is a pleasure if you know where it belongs. Lynn Hoffman, author of The New Short Course in Wine and the forthcoming novel bang-BANG from kunati press. Rating:  - The best book you will ever find on this subjectUtterly comprehensive, fantasically informative and an utter delight. If you like food, you'll love this! How anyone else gave it less than five stars I can't imagine Rating: - Mistakes, Yes, But Value NeverthelessI agree with other reviewers that Trager's book contains numerous errors. Nevertheless, there's nothing I've read quite like it for breadth of coverage of food history. The book is a resource for food writers like me, or anyone who wants a good source of ideas about food. I can check my facts elsewhere. I particularly enjoy Trager's treatment of food processing and industrial food history, as well as his analysis of food and nutrition fads over the past few centuries. His coverage of food-related and deficiency illnesses is also deep, and has spurred me to further reading. If you read The Food Chronology from cover to cover, as I did over a period of several months, you cannot help but be stimulated and enriched. Food writer Elliot Essman's other reviews and food articles are available at www.stylegourmet.com Rating: - Mistakes indeedThe reviewer from Japan was right in noting mistakes. This book is riddled with them, especially typos, skewed facts and sometimes real gaffes. (But begging your indulgence, fellow reviwer, eggplants are not from the Americas.)
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