Book description
For thousands of years we have grown, cooked and traded food, and
over that time much has changed. Where once we subsisted on gritty,
bland grains, we now enjoy culinary creations and epicurean delights
made with vegetables from the New World, fish trawled from the deep
sea, and flavoured with spices from the Orient.
But how did we make that change from eating for survival to the
innovations of modern cuisine? How has food helped to shape our
culture? And what will happen when global warming and peak oil have
their inevitable effect on agriculture?
Empires of Food is an authoritative exploration of the
innumerable ways that food has changed the course of history. The
earliest cities, after all, were founded on the creation and exchange
of food surpluses, and since then trade routes of ever greater
sophistication have developed. We've built complex societies by
shunting corn and wheat and rice along rivers, up deforested
hillsides, and into the stockpots of history.
But we cannot go on forever. As Evan D. G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas
compellingly show, the abundance that we all enjoy comes at a price,
and unless we think of a more sustainable way to grow, eat and enjoy
food, we may find that our civilization reaches its best before date.
Evan D. G. Fraser holds the Canada Research Chair in Global
Human Security in the Department of Geography at the University of
Guelph, Canada, and is a Senior Lecturer in Sustainable Development at
the University of Leeds. He has first-hand experience with food
production in a range of settings, including the UK, Thailand, Belize,
British Columbia, and Ontario, and has published many scholarly
research articles and book chapters, as well as policy briefs on
environmental issues for senior politicians. He lives in Southern
Ontario with his wife and three children.
Andrew Rimas is a journalist based in Boston, Massachusetts.
He is the editor of The Improper Bostonian magazine and has
worked as an associate editor and staff writer at Boston
magazine. His work has also frequently appeared in The Boston
Globe, as well as the Boston Globe magazine, the Mail on
Sunday, the Ottawa Citizen and other publications. Along
with Evan D. G. Fraser, he is the co-author of Beef: The Untold
Story of How Milk, Meat, and Muscle Shaped the World.
