The Food Chronology: A Food Lover's Compendium of Events and Anecdotes, from Prehistory to the Present [Paperback]

James Trager (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1997

Published in hardcover to much acclaim, this winner of the IACP Julia Child Award for Best Food Reference presents a highly informative overview of the cultural development of food and food availability throughout human history. More than 13,000 entries in 27 specialized categories provide informative and entertaining facts about fast food, health food, supermarkets, etiquette, and more. 200 illustrations.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Fascinating food facts can be as appealing as mouth-watering recipes. Hence the allure of The Food Chronolgy: A Food Lover's Compendium of Events and Anecdotes, From Prehistory to the Present. From this tour de force, you learn when the first tuna was canned, the first Hershey Kiss introduced, and the first Baci candy made in Italy--all in 1909. In 1995, the hardcover edition of this paperback won the Julia Child Cookbook Award for Best Food Reference. This paperback edition, published in 1997, deluges you with the same information, including material on politics, art, economics, medicine, in all, a total of 50 fields, all related to food. On the down side, many facts lack a context or sufficient explanation to make them useful. Why, for example, did the Greeks get pepper from India in 431 B.C.? Trivia nuts will have a feast. Researchers may find this farrago of facts poorly organized when tracking information through time. Spotty indexing does not help. Overall, there is an abundance of information with little sense of its significance.

Product Details

• Paperback: 800 pages
• Publisher: Owl Books (NY) (May 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080505247X
• ISBN-13: 978-0805052473
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,307,522 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but full of mistakes, January 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Food Chronology: A Food Lover's Compendium of Events and Anecdotes, from Prehistory to the Present (Paperback)

Well, my daughter borrowed it from the school library and when I first saw it I was enthralled and soon started browsing and could not stop reading, but then I fell onto some rather mistaken informations which, I am afraid, put the seed of mistrust in me. If I find such mistakes about subjects that I know well about, how many other people will also find other mistakes in this book about the subjects that they know well ? For instance, page 62, year 1274, we find: THe Japanese continue their relatively peaceful lives, shopping at the markets of Edo, Kyoto and Nara for (....)aubergines (.....) strawberries.(...).In those days Edo was a tiny village and Kyoto was certainly not called Kyoto either, as it was the capital, it was still called Heian-kyo or Miyako. Also, aubergines belong to the capsicum family and together with tomatoes, peppers, chilis, potatoes, they came from America, and certainly did not exist in Japan in those days. As for strawberries, are not they also one of the delicacies that we owe to America, as it appears on page 117 of the same book ? (1620) Regarding the Japanese peaceful lives too, this sounds a bit odd because this period is still troubled by feudal wars and plots and revenges, with lots of murders, castles burning, fields ravaged and people exiled... Hum! So much for peace! From a reader in Japan.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It's not real history, but fascinating anyway, February 2, 2001

By 

Makiko Itoh "maki to all" (Earth) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Food Chronology: A Food Lover's Compendium of Events and Anecdotes, from Prehistory to the Present (Paperback)

This book is a great read, and very entertaining. It wouldn't be used in any college history course, but probably was not intended for that. I was also rather disappointed that the 20th century took up so much of the book; plus inclusion of trendy-at-the-time-the-book-was-written restaurants in a supposed history of food seemed to be a bit gratuitous. Finally, though this may be something to be expected, ,the book (especially for later periods) is very Amero-centric, with most of the rest of the attention going to Europe, and just a snippet here or there of other food cultures.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mistakes, Yes, But Value Nevertheless, July 5, 2004

By 

Elliot Essman (Larchmont, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Food Chronology: A Food Lover's Compendium of Events and Anecdotes, from Prehistory to the Present (Paperback)

I agree with other reviewers that Trager's book contains numerous errors. Nevertheless, there's nothing I've read quite like it for breadth of coverage of food history. The book is a resource for food writers like me, or anyone who wants a good source of ideas about food. I can check my facts elsewhere. I particularly enjoy Trager's treatment of food processing and industrial food history, as well as his analysis of food and nutrition fads over the past few centuries. His coverage of food-related and deficiency illnesses is also deep, and has spurred me to further reading. If you read The Food Chronology from cover to cover, as I did over a period of several months, you cannot help but be stimulated and enriched.

Food writer Elliot Essman's other reviews and food articles are available at www.stylegourmet.com