Near a Thousand Tables by Felipe Fernández-Armesto Page B

interesting but lacks the coherence of some of its rivals.
The Cambridge World History of Food
appeared late in the year 2000, when the present book was almost finished; together with Alan Davidson’s
The Oxford Companion to Food,
which preceded it by about a year, it is invaluable for reference and unbeatable for browsing. But its massive dimensions make it a work
sui generis;
and its greatest strengths are on the study of food as a source of nutrition, rather than culture.
    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.
    The method I have adopted is to classify the material under the headings of eight great “revolutions”—as I call them—which seem to me, between them, to provide an overview of the entire history of food. This method should have enabled me to be more concise than is possible in traditional approaches which categorize the subject product by product or place by place or period by period. By calling my divisions revolutions I do not mean to suggest they were rapid episodes, narrowly confined in time. On the contrary, though I think it is fair to say that they all began atparticular moments, they all had stuttering starts, long unfoldings and enduring reverberations. The origins of some are truly lost in the vast expanses of prehistory. Some of them started at different times in different places. Some of them began long ago and are still going on. Though I have tried to give my account of them a very broad chronological structure, it should be obvious to readers that my revolutions did not happen in sequence, but overlapped in unpatterned complexity. All of them are in a special sense part of the history of food but have obvious repercussions beyond it, in other aspects of world history. To emphasize these continuities, I try to keep up a program of shifts between past and present, place and place.
    The first revolution is the invention of cooking, which I see as an episode of human self-differentiation from the rest of nature, and an inaugural event in the history of social change. I deal next with the discovery that food is more than sustenance—that its production, distribution, preparation and consumption generate rites and magic, as eating becomes ritualized and irrational or suprarational. My third revolution is the “herding revolution”—the domestication and selective breeding of edible animal species: I deal with this before plant-based agriculture, which is the subject of my fourth revolution, partly for convenience and partly to draw attention to my argument that at least one kind of animal husbandry—snail farming—was an earlier innovation than is generally admitted. The fifth revolution is the use of food as a means and index of social differentiation: under this heading, I try to trace a line of continuity from the probably Paleolithic origins of privileged entitlement in competition for food, down to the courtly and bourgeois cuisines of modern times. The sixth revolution is that of long-range trade and the role of food in cultural exchanges of transforming effect. The seventh is the ecological revolution of the last five hundred years, which is now usually called the “Columbian Exchange,” and the place of foodstuffs in it. Finally, I turn to industrialization in the “developing” world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: what food contributed to it and what were its effects on