"It is no way to eat oysters," proclaims Fernandez-Armesto in his opening sentence, referring to the fiddly habits of restaurant diners. "This is deliberate provocation, designed to refresh the bivalves before death, a little mild torture under which you can sometimes feel that you see the victims wriggle or flinch." He goes on to describe the proper method: "Unless you discard the utensils, raise the half-shell to your mouth, throw back your head, scrape the creature from its lair with your teeth, taste its briny juice and squelch it slightly against the palate before swallowing it alive, you deprive yourself of a historic experience." Unlike almost every other food in Western cuisine, the oyster has remained virtually the same "since the first emergence of our species."
Food writers need to be passionate and opinionated about their subject; dollops of wit and poetry are also esteemed. Though a scholar and historian rather than food writer, Fernandez-Armesto brings all of these qualities to the table as well as an almost staggering breadth of information. His aim, as stated in the preface: "to take a genuinely global perspective; to treat food history as a theme of world history, inseparable from all the other interactions of human beings with one another and with the rest of nature; to treat evenhandedly the ecological, cultural and culinary concepts of the subject; to combine a broad conspectus with selectively detailed excursions into particular cases; to trace connections at every stage, between the food of the past and the way we eat today; and to do all this briefly." Whew. And does he succeed? Yes, although at times the flow of knowledge overwhelms the ability to process.
But that's fine. This is a book to savor and enjoy, to dip into and re-read, to pull out at dinner parties to settle arguments. For, besides liveliness and wit, Fernandez-Armesto's writing has another invaluable quality - authority. When he makes an unequivocal statement, you, the reader, do not doubt him. For instance, sugar, he writes, "is now the world's biggest food product, beating even wheat." Startling perhaps, but not subject to debate. Unfortunately the reader's audience, those recipients of unrequested quotes, not being under the author's authoritative spell, sometimes require more convincing, which Fernandez-Armesto's notes, though copious, cannot always supply. Reference to his credentials - Oxford University professor, author of 13 serious, popular and opinionated histories ("Millenium: A History of the Last Thousand Years," "Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature,") - may do the trick.
The book is organized into eight "revolutions," beginning with the advent of cooking, which not only sets us apart from other animals, but contributes to social cohesion. Food as ritual discusses, among other things, cannibalism ("Strangely, cannibals turn out to have a lot in common with vegans") health fads, and sacred and taboo foods. Next comes herding and farming animals, then agriculture, then food as status (which includes eye-popping menus of conspicuous consumption through the ages).
Things begin to get more complicated with "The Edible Horizon" - long-range trade and food in cultural exchange - which ranges from cultural bias in food to the broadening of diet through war and imperialism, particularly Western empire building in the 17th to 19th centuries. "Challenging Evolution" explores the movement of food around the world, particularly between "Old" world and "New" world. The "Colombian Exchange" of the last 500 years has resulted in radical diet change. Imagine Italy without the tomato, Ireland without the potato, India or Thailand without chilies, our Midwest without wheat. The final chapter concerns the industrialization of the last two centuries, from the "Green Revolution" of world feeding through pesticides and mono-crops and factory farms and production to the giants of food industry (Hershey and Mars, the Quakers of England) and preserving from canning and freezing to irradiation.
No surprise, Fernandez-Armesto is not in favor of irradiation, fast food ("the closest thing to conveyor-belt eating the Industrial Revolution had yet produced."), fusion cookery ("Lego cookery") or the microwave, which "is best suited to that public enemy, the solitary eater," destroying the communal ritual of mealtime. His opinions, which crop up with refreshing acidity throughout the book, portray a man of keen and discerning appetite, whose love of food extends to this scholarly and entertaining professional treatment. Although the author himself does not take this work as seriously as his other books, calling it a "devoir de vacances," with research spun-off from a previous work, "Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature," it is enjoyably written, thought provoking, myth debunking and convincingly thorough. Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in food that goes beyond shoveling it in.
