PastryWiz 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
by: James Trager

Price*$70.99
as of 02/09/2010 15:44 EDT

Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.09
EAN: 9780805052473
ISBN: 080505247X
Label: Owl Books (NY)
Languages: EnglishOriginal LanguageEnglishUnknownEnglishPublished
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:
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:  out of 5 stars

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - 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: 5 out of 5 stars - The best book you will ever find on this subject
Utterly 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: 5 out of 5 stars - Mistakes, Yes, But Value Nevertheless
I 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: 3 out of 5 stars - Mistakes indeed
The 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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The Food Chronology: A Food Lover's Compendium of Events and Anecdotes, from Prehistory to the Present
Price*$70.99
as of 02/09/2010 15:44 EDT

 

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Product prices and availability updated on 02/09/2010 15:44 EDT.