A Movable Feast
Ten Millennia of Food Globalization

Combining fascinating facts with historical evidence, this book is a sweeping narrative of food's place in the world.

Kenneth F. Kiple (Author)

9781107657458, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 12 August 2013

381 pages
22.8 x 15.3 x 2 cm, 0.53 kg

'… it is a pleasure to see this offspring volume, written by one of [The Cambridge World History of Food]'s co-editors, providing readers with a rich taste of the larger volume's delights, but at a manageable size and price … The whole experience of reading the book is rather like being absorbed in an animated and engaging dinner party conversation. The talk never ceases to be interesting …' The Historian

Pepper was once worth its weight in gold. Onions have been used to cure everything from sore throats to foot fungus. White bread was once considered too nutritious. From hunting water buffalo to farming salmon, A Movable Feast chronicles the globalization of food over the past ten thousand years. This engaging history follows the path that food has taken throughout history and the ways in which humans have altered its course. Beginning with the days of hunter-gatherers and extending to the present world of genetically modified chickens, Kenneth F. Kiple details the far-reaching adventure of food. He investigates food's global impact, from the Irish potato famine to the birth of McDonald's. Combining fascinating facts with historical evidence, this is a sweeping narrative of food's place in the world. Looking closely at geographic, cultural and scientific factors, this book reveals how what we eat has transformed over the years from fuel to art.

Preface: a movable feast: ten millennia of food globalization
Introduction: from foraging to farming
1. Last hunters, first farmers
2. Building the barnyard
3. Promiscuous plants of the northern fertile crescent
4. Peripatetic plants of Eastern Asia
5. Fecund fringes of the northern fertile crescent
6. Consequences of the Neolithic
7. Enterprise and empires
8. Faith and foodstuffs
9. Empires in the rubble of Rome
10. Medieval progress and poverty
11. Spain's New World, the Northern Hemisphere
12. New world, new foods
13. New foods in the southern New World
14. The Columbian exchange and the Old Worlds
15. The Columbian exchange and the New Worlds
16. Sugar and new beverages
17. Kitchen Hispanization
18. Producing plenty in paradise
19. The frontiers of foreign foods
20. Capitalism, colonialism, and cuisine
21. Homemade food homogeneity
22. Notions of nutrients and nutriments
23. The perils of plenty
24. The globalization of plenty
25. Fast food, a hymn to cellulite
26. Parlous plenty into the twenty-first century
27. People and plenty in the twenty-first century.

Subject Areas: Archaeology [HD], General & world history [HBG], History [HB]