History and Food

I love books that combine two of my obsessions; history and food, so its no great surprise that I enjoyed Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's Near a Thousand Tables. It is a good survey of the emergence of the various modes of food production and of the role food (and eating) have played in culture. Anybody who is familiar with recent scholarship in the field isn't going to find anything staggeringly original or controversial but those brought up on 'progressivist' views of the evolution of human societies might get a few jolts. I was though intrigued by the notion that the snail may have been the first animal to be 'farmed'. The book ends on an optimistic note with a suggestion that the "industrial revolution" in food production may have peaked (at least in the west) and that some kind of recivilizing of the eating process is taking place. I'm not sure.