Near a thousand tables : a history of food / Felipe Fernández-Armesto.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. The Invention of Cooking: The First Revolution -- 2. The Meaning of Eating: Food as Rite and Magic -- 3. Breeding to Eat: The Herding Revolution: From "Collecting" Food to "Producing" It -- 4. The Edible Earth: Managing Plant Life for Food -- 5. Food and Rank: Inequality and the Rise of Haute Cuisine -- 6. The Edible Horizon: Food and the Long-Range Exchange of Culture -- 7. Challenging Evolution: Food and Ecological Exchange -- 8. Feeding the Giants: Food and Industrialization in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

"In Near a Thousand Tables, Oxford historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto tells the fascinating story of food as cultural as well as culinary history - ecology as well as gastronomy." "At the heart of this engrossing book are what Fernandez-Armesto calls the eight great revolutions in the world history of food: the origins of cooking, which set humankind on a course apart from other species; the ritualization of eating, which brought magic and meaning into people's relationship with what they ate; the inception of herding and the invention of agriculture, perhaps the two greatest revolutions of all; the rise of inequality; which made food an indicator of rank and led to the development of haute cuisine; the long-range trade in food, which, practically alone, broke down cultural barriers; the ecological exchanges, which revolutionized the global distribution of plants and livestock; and, finally, the industrialization and globalization of food. Near a Thousand Tables reveals what microwave families and tube-fed astronauts have in common with pre-social hominids; why India is the source of street food in Cairo and court food in Isfahan; why the name "avocado" is derived from an Aztec anatomical term."--BOOK JACKET.