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Has the Companion a Future?

Nobody could deny that the Cambridge world history offood is a bargain. For £110 the purchaser gets 2150 pages, with 224 contributors from 15 different countries. The six main parts are devoted to what our ancestors ate, staple foods, dietary liquids, the nutrients, food around the world, history of nutrition and health and contemporary policy issues. The text concludes with a 176-page dictionary of world plant foods; the two volumes are printed on good paper, the pages open easily, and the relatively large typeface of the index makes for easy legibility. The portents, then, are good, and are often realized by the excellent handling of the diverse themes. The introductory articles by the editors (one of whom, Kenneth F Kiple, of Bowling Green State University, also edited the Cambridge world history of disease) are among the exemplars, and other outstanding essays include those on the history of brewing, breast-feeding, famine, rice, coffee, and potatoes. Some topics are unexpected: the importance of food lobbies, foods as aphrodisiacs, and the psychology of food and food choice. And current controversies, such as the role of fat in atherosclerosis, or salt in hypertension, are well dealt with in a balanced way. The reader who stays the course will realize the continual evolution of globalization of food throughout history, and will hardly doubt another of the work's major themes: that every important agricultural breakthrough so far has had unhappy consequences for health. And he or she will have encountered a lively succession of facts, and often as comprehensive a coverage as is required. Collectors of the arcane or the fatuous will also have a field day. Naples, for example, was the last major city to rely on pigs to dispose of its night soil. In the 1830s, the annual consumption of spirits in the USA reached a peak of over 5 gallons per capita, while currently every day each member of the Buganda people consumes 4-4.5 kg of bananas. The Aztecs ate the arms and legs of their victims with a chimole sauce not dissimilar to today's salsa mexicana. Research in Helsinki has shown that the most annoying social odours are sweat and alcohol; the least, garlic and aftershave. And, in the nineteenth century, Oxford ditched an outstanding oarsman on the grounds that his vegetarianism might corrupt the rest of the boat crew. All this, then, might add up to an overwhelming success for this …