Customer Reviews

The Gourmet Atlas: The History, Origin, and Migration of Foods of the World

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I was expecting something more scholarly I suppose. The Gourmet Atlas contains: some great maps of the migration of foodstuffs; recipes which look good; time-lines; charts and some wonderful photos and pretty pictures. But this visual appeal is at the expense of the text, which I found light-weight, and the writing is sometimes confusing. If you are serious about food then this is lacking in many areas - no bibliography or references for starters and I found some factual errors. The very short introduction promises that the atlas will be THE source for the avid student and casual inquirer. The serious student would be better to stick to something like Waverley Root's FOOD.Meanwhile I await Alan Davidson's The Oxford Companion to Food. The Gourmet Atlas is a pretty book and could prove quite handy butis hardly a definitive reference. Good for someone starting out with an interest in food.

I love food books and history books and was perhaps expecting a more thorough discussion of the history of food and it's migration from region to region. At best, the discussions were cursory and hardly as comprehensive as one would expect in a book labeled as an atlas. Significant information was missing about foods that weren't of interest to the authors and information about other foods important enough in historical economic impact to require their entry still left out detail I know from other, better sources.

At best, this book serves adequately, perhaps even well, as an introduction to it's subject, but it is little better than that. IMO, for cover price, it's not worth it. For $..., it certainly is worth the content. Amazon's price comes close, but not close enough for me to give this as a gift (unless I give my own copy).

I am currently taking an upper division geography course on food topics and we are using the "The Gourmet Atlas" as a text. The general feeling of the class is that the maps in this book lack a reasonable cartographic approach. This is quite sad considering that it is an 'atlas'. However, the book does offer some background knowledge on various kinds of foods(though minimal). I personally think the subject the authors tried to take on is extremely fascinating but the manner in which they did so was not successful.