"Bats and beets, silk worms and stewed prunes, scorpions and scampi, flamingo and flan, ostrich and okra - what we eat and what we don't eat is largely a matter of habit, history and geographical circumstances," author Jerry Hopkins writes in the introduction to Strange Foods. Chock-full of bizarre gastronomic information from far-flung reaches, stirred up with bits of anthropological and autobiographical information, Jerry Hopkins has created a masterpiece about what we eat. The adventurous reader will find chapters on such delicacies as rat, dog, elephant, and buffalo. If reptiles are more to your liking, you'll find information on edible lizards, snakes, and toads. In the final section, entitled "Leftovers," Hopkins highlights such ersatz delicacies as fake food and gold and silver. With 250 full-color photographs by Michael Freeman, Strange Foods is sure to shock and delight.
Michael Freeman, professional photographer and author, with more than 100 book titles to his credit, was born in England in 1945, took a Masters in geography at Brasenose College, Oxford University, and then worked in advertising in London for six years. He made the break from there in 1971 to travel up the Amazon with two secondhand cameras, and when Time-Life used many of the pictures extensively in the Amazon volume of their World's Wild Places series, including the cover, they encouraged him to begin a full-time photographic career.
Since then, working for editorial clients that include all the world's major magazines, and notably the Smithsonian Magazine (with which he has had a 30-year association, shooting more than 40 stories), Freeman's reputation has resulted in more than 100 books published. Of these, he is author as well as photographer, and they include more than 40 books on the practice of photography - for this photographic educational work he was awarded the Prix Louis Philippe Clerc by the French Ministry of Culture. He is also responsible for the distance-learning courses on photography at the UK's Open College of the Arts.
Freeman's books on photography have been translated into fifteen languages, and are available on other Amazon international sites.
They are supported for readers by a regularly updated site, http://thefreemanview.com
