» Near a Thousand Tables : A History of Food

Near a Thousand Tables : A History of Food Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: An Intriguing Bood
Comment: A fascinating and erudite account of our prehistoric and historic relationship with food. The book discusses such things as herding versus hunting, sea weed, cannibalism... etc. I highly recommend this page-turner for its delightful insights into our most treasured habit -- eating!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: amazon never delivered!
Comment: This is a great book although, amazon never delivered. I had ordered this book 2 weeks before school(along with 2 other books for school), it never came. Amazon said that i have an "undeliverable" address, but when i ordered it from ebay i got it in 3 dAys! Then i had to wait forever for a refund!

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Customer Rating:
Summary: painfully boring
Comment: This book is painfully boring, which is quite an accomplishment, considering how exciting food can be. The author describes an oyster experience in the beginning that parallels Bourdain's opening for Kitchen Confidential, but after that, this book becomes bloodless. Where is the love? Many feel it at every meal. I'm not sure this is true for the author.

One gets the sense that food is not really important to this book other than as a commodity. Sheesh. He seems to miss the point... unless we should be viewing cannibalism as an important alternative to the menu at Chanterelle (the subject of eating human flesh gets 12 of 220+ pages). That's about 5% of the book's bulk, but it is indicative of the roundabout way Fernandez-Armesto takes to talk about something that impacts us, hopefully, three times a day.

Most remarkable to me is that the author is most animated when dissing vegetarianism. I consider "bacon-wrapped" to be the sweetest and best modifier in the English language; still, his dismissive approach to vegetarianism makes his arguments extremely suspect for me.

I would hate to be eating tapas across the table from Fernandez-Armesto. He could make pickled boquerones boring.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but painfully biased
Comment: Near a Thousand Tables, subtitled A History of Food, is a very interesting, fairly well written (for an academic) book. The sections about the invention of cooking, food as rite and magic, the herding revolution, managing plant life for food, food and rank, food and the long range exchange of culture, food and ecological exchange, and food and industrialization in the 19th and 20th centuries are covered in depth and contain some interesting surprises. Unfortunately,the author is clearly biased, which seriously detracts from the book's value. For example, he tries (unsuccessfully) to compare vegans to cannibals with the arrogance too often found in academics. He writes that cannibalism is acceptable in many cases, whereas vegans and other "foodies" (his term) eat for spiritual reasons or (God forbid!) health and longevity: his link to cannibalism, since both have "meaning" beyond nourishment. If you can stomach this kind of extremely offensive, biased BS throughout, the book is worth reading.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Overwrought
Comment: I found this book as overdone and dry as a steak left in the broiler too long. What some reviewers call "erudite" I call boring, irrelevant, and stuffy. For example, the author devotes many pages to the topic of cannibalism, and he manages even to make this as boring as writing about boiled potatoes. Here's a sample from the cannibalism section: "Is it part of the histoire de l'alimentation - a feeding practice designed to supply eaters with protein? Or does it belong to the history of food, as presented in this chapter - a ritual practiced not for a meal but for its meaning, nourishment for more than material effect?" And that's one of the more livelier sentences. My history book club chose this book, but none of us could get past the second chapter. I'd rather eat this book than read it.

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