Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. Free Press, $14, 258 pages.
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto has no problem piling his plate high with subject matter. Among the Oxford history professor's books have been Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years and Civilizations: Culture, Ambition and the Transformation of Nature.
He supersizes his scope again in Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food. It's a smorgasbord of toothsome factoids, organized to explore Fernandez-Armesto's thesis that food and how it is obtained, prepared and consumed have had enormous effects on human culture.
Each chapter focuses on some revolutionary change in how and what people eat: the invention of cooking, the religious and magical uses of food, haute cuisine as a badge of status.
Two chapters examine humankind's switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture, while others look at more recent developments, such as the impact of industrial food technology and the ecological changes wrought by the cross-cultural movement of foods.
Fernandez-Armesto brings a global perspective and a scholar's intensity to his subject, as well as an iconoclastic attitude. He sneers at "fashionable" nutrition such as the fear of sugar and butter: "The idea that health is generally served by ingestion of laboratory concoctions such as artificial sweeteners, margarines and sucrose polyester is offensive to brain and palate alike."
Some of the food-influenced history Fernandez-Armesto examines is well-known. European nations fought long, bitter wars over control of salt sources and spice islands, and the European discovery of the Americas and the "Columbian exchange" that followed transformed Old World cooking (before that, Italy had no tomatoes and Ireland no potatoes).
Some of his findings are surprising: Early agriculture was probably a much more difficult, labor-intensive way of getting food than the hunting and gathering it replaced. And some are disturbing: In the 20th century, the fishing industry increased its harvest from the oceans fortyfold, exceeding the catch of all previous centuries combined - an increase that cannot be sustainable.
Taking in all of the erudition served up in Near a Thousand Tables at one sitting would overstuff most people's brains. But nibbling at one tasty chapter at a time is a fine way to feed your head.
