This book, based largely on the Cambridge World History of Food, provides a look at the globalization of food from the days of the hunter-gatherers to present-day genetically modified plants and animals. The establishment of agriculture and the domestication of animals in Eurasia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas are all treated in some detail along with the subsequent diffusion of farming cultures through the activities of monks, missionaries, migrants, imperialists, explorers, traders, and raiders. Much attention is given to the 'Columbian Exchange' of plants and animals that brought revolutionary demographic change to every corner of the planet and led ultimately to the European occupation of Australia and New Zealand as well as the rest of Oceania. Final chapters deal with the impact of industrialization on food production, processing, and distribution, and modern-day food-related problems ranging from famine to obesity to genetically modified food to fast food.
This book, based largely on the Cambridge World History of Food, provides a look at the globalization of food from the days of the hunter-gatherers to present-day genetically modified plants and animals. The establishment of agriculture and the domestication of animals in Eurasia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Americas are all treated in some detail along with the subsequent diffusion of farming cultures through the activities of monks, missionaries, migrants, imperialists, explorers, traders, and raiders. Much attention is given to the 'Columbian Exchange' of plants and animals that brought revolutionary demographic change to every corner of the planet and led ultimately to the European occupation of Australia and New Zealand as well as the rest of Oceania. Final chapters deal with the impact of industrialization on food production, processing, and distribution, and modern-day food-related problems ranging from famine to obesity to genetically modified food to fast food.
Über den Autor
Kenneth F. Kiple is a Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. His edited collections include The Cambridge Historical Dictionary of Disease (2003); The Cambridge World History of Food (2000, with Kriemhild Conee Ornelas); Biological Consequences of European Expansion 1450-1800 (1997, with Stephen V. Beck); Plague, Pox, and Pestilence: Disease in History (1997); The Cambridge History of World Disease (1993); and The African Exchange: Toward a Biological History of Black People (1987). Kiple is author of The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (1984); Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora: Diet, Disease, and Racism (1981); and Blacks in Colonial Cuba 1774-1899 (1976, with Virginia Himmelsteib King). His considerable body of written works also includes numerous articles and essays in scholarly journals and books. His work has been supported with grants and fellowships from institutions including the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society and the National Institutes of Health.
Zusammenfassung
This work draws heavily on the Cambridge World History of Food. It begins with the transition from foraging to farming that got underway some 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, then examines subsequent transitions in Egypt, Africa south of the Sahara, China, southeast Asia, the Indus Valley, Oceania, Europe, and the Americas. It ends with chapters on genetically modified foods, the fast food industry, the nutritional ailments people have suffered from, famine, and the obesity epidemic.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
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.
