Moveable Feasts - (At Table) by Gregory McNamee (Paperback)

About the Book

Explores the natural history of 30 of the world's major food plants, explaining why and how they have been important in human history.

Book Synopsis

Food has functioned both as a source of continuity and as a subject of adaptation over the course of human history. Onions have been a staple of the European diet since the Paleolithic era; by contrast, the orange is once again being cultivated in large quantities in southern China, where it was originally grown. Other foods remain staples of their original regions as well as of the world diet at large. Still others are now grown in places that would have seemed impossible in the past-bananas in heated greenhouses in Iceland, corn on the fringes of the Gobi Desert, tomatoes on the International Space Station. But how did humans discover how to grow and incorporate these foods into their diet in the first place? How were they chosen over competing foods? In this charming and frequently surprising compendium, Moveable Feasts gathers revelations from history, anthropology, chemistry, biology, and many other fields and spins them into entertaining tales of discovery while adding more than ninety delicious recipes from various culinary traditions around the world. Among the thirty types of food discussed in the course of this alphabetically arranged work are the apple, the banana, chocolate, coffee, corn, garlic, honey, millet, the olive, the peanut, the pineapple, the plum, rice, the soybean, the tomato, and the watermelon. All the recipes accompanying these diverse food histories have been adapted for re-creation in the modern kitchen. Gregory McNamee is the author or editor of twenty-eight books and has published articles in a wide variety of periodicals, from Smithsonian and Sierra to the Washington Post. He is a contributing editor for Encyclopaedia Britannica, for which he writes about world geography and culture, including food.

Review Quotes

"Moveable Feasts is a pleasure to read and serves to highlight the strength of an interdisciplinary approach to studying food."--Jonathan Deutsch, Gastronomica

"All food is the product of history, but who ate the first tomatoes and garlic, and how did they become so important in our diet and ubiquitous at the grocery store? Writer, journalist, editor, and critic McNamee presents a cultural geography of how food, such as broccoli, corn, rice, and hone, has moved about the planet. Each chapter contains a brief history of the food, basic nutritional information, and trivia, spun together in a chatty, conversational tone, followed by several recipes containing the featured ingredient and suggestions for further reading."--Library Journal

"In delightfully readable prose, McNamee considers some 30 assorted foods that make up a substantial part of the earth's comestible bounty."--Mark Knoblauch, Booklist

"The author's research is exhaustive, his pages packed with fascinating detail, and he does an excellent job of marrying the historical and scientific aspects of each ingredient. . . . Well-executed."--Kirkus

About the Author

Gregory McNamee is the author or editor of twenty-eight books and has published articles in a wide variety of periodicals, from Smithsonian and Sierra to the Washington Post. He is a contributing editor for Encyclopaedia Britannica, for which he writes about world geography and culture, including food.