The Food Chronology: A Food Lover's Compendium of Events and Anecdotes from Prehistory to the Present

by James Trager

Book Overview

Provides a history of the evolution of food and food availability from prehistory to the present day, and covers agriculture, nutrition, retailing, and the culinary arts. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080505247X
• ISBN13: 9780805052473
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Owl Books (NY)
• Length: 800 Pages
• Weight: 2.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 7.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

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

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

It's not real history, but fascinating anyway

This book is a great read, and very entertaining. It wouldn't be used in any college history course, but probably was not intended for that. I was also rather disappointed that the 20th century took up so much of the book; plus inclusion of trendy-at-the-time-the-book-was-written restaurants in a supposed history of food seemed to be a bit gratuitous. Finally, though this may be something to be expected, ,the book (especially for later periods) is very Amero-centric, with most of the rest of the attention going to Europe, and just a snippet here or there of other food cultures.

Fascinating Book! Great for reference or browsing!!!

This exhaustive book of the history of food is extremely intresting and well written. A must have for anyone intrested in food!