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One of the things you do when you get a Ph.D. in English is read–a lot. But you tend to read more deeply and more narrowly, and learn to close your ears to the siren songs of books outside of your chosen field. You learn to set aside a book and allot yourself a little at a time, like making your bag of Halloween candy last until Thanksgiving. Or maybe you make a list and daydream about the long summer days when you’ll do nothing but read, luxuriously picking up a new one as soon as you’ve sighed the cover shut on the last. That’s why I associate summer with the sheer pleasure of reading. Most of you are just starting your last summer before college, but before I make a recommendation for how you should spend part of your reading time, I need to make a confession: I am a promiscuous reader. I was not trained to be, but I am. Maybe not promiscuous in the sense that I abandon one book for another. No, it’s more like I just can’t have enough of them. I once spent a month reading travel narratives about Borneo, and an entire sweltering Texas summer reading Arctic explorer narratives, after which I began to check my gums for signs of scurvy. One of my favorite subjects, to which I often return, is food. And so, of all the recent books I’ve read, which range from a history of sex in early America to the biography of Green Bay Packer coaching legend Vince Lombardi, I enthusiastically recommend Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food. The first thing to say about this book is that it’s blazingly smart (and occasionally smart-alecky, as well). You know you’re in the company of a writer who’s not afraid of provocative ideas when you encounter this claim, not 30 pages into the book: "Health foodies — or other contemporary faddists who eat for beauty or brainpower or sex drive or tranquility or spirituality — are in the category of the cannibals." Yes, you read that right: vegetarians are similar to eaters of human flesh. He makes a compelling argument in defense of the idea, but you’ll need to read the book to understand it. Fernández-Armesto, a man after my own slow-cooking heart, also assails the microwave oven as "counterrevolutionary," arguing that "it reverses the cooking revolution, which made eating sociable, and returns us, in this respect, to a presocial phase of evolution." Right again: microwave dinners and solitary cavemen are made for each other
Unlike books, or art, food belongs to both nature and culture. In our daily contact with it we’re reminded that we belong simultaneously to the creature world and to the complex system of human society. We put it in our bodies, offer it to each other, celebrate and mourn over it. Near a Thousand Tables is as much a history of food as it is a history of human culture through what we’ve eaten since our first meals of roots and seeds to our microwavable enchiladas.
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Fernández-Armesto’s
elegant and immensely learned book belongs to the
growing field of food studies, formerly the province
of eccentric chemists, obsessed pastry makers,
and high-school home economics teachers. Drawing
on sources from a wide range of disciplines (biology,
geography, archeology, cultural studies, and philosophy,
to name a few), Fernández-Armesto, a professor
of history at Oxford University, organizes his
ambitious history into eight "food revolutions," which
form the chapters of the book. Readers won’t
be surprised that he identifies cooking, cultivating
plants, and breeding animals for food as revolutions,
but they may be surprised to see that he also chooses
the development of food as ritual, the rise of
haute cuisine, the role of food in cultural exchange,
and the industrialization of food production as
equally momentous events in the human history of
food.
features
reviews by members of the Southwestern University
community. Some reviews were previously published
in the Library's annual Summer Reading List.Send questions or comments to libweb@southwestern.edu