An informative look at the history of eating that's a tasty combo of fact and fun We enjoy watching celebrity chefs on TV, but so few of us choose to cook at home. The gourmet health food industry is soaring, yet a longtime love affair with fast food endures. Food and eating habits - good and bad - have shaped cultures, accounted for behaviors, and created a sense of individual as well as cultural identity... but how? And why? Social psychology professor...

"A social, cultural, and-above all-culinary history of dessert, Sweet Invention explores the world's great dessert traditions, from ancient India to 21st-century Indiana. Each chapter begins with author Michael Krondl tasting and analyzing an icon of dessert, such as baklava from the Middle East or macarons from France, and then combines extensive scholarship with a lively writing style to spin an ancient tale of some of the world's favorite treats...

"The stories in this collection open a window onto those new categories in the making. Taken together, they call for new approaches to the history of global food, and using this history to think about our future"--

"Here the author tells the remarkable story of the rise and fall of the world's great cuisines from the mastery of grain cooking some twenty thousand years ago, to the present. Probing beneath the apparent confusion of dozens of cuisines to reveal the underlying simplicity of the culinary family tree, she shows how periodic seismic shifts in 'culinary philosophy', beliefs about health, the economy, politics, society and the gods, prompted the construction...

"Is it possible to identify a starting point in history from which everything else unfolds--a single moment that can explain the present and reveal the essence of our identities? According to Massimo Montanari, this is just a myth: by themselves, origins explain very little and historical phenomena can only be understood dynamically--by looking at how events and identities develop and change as a result of encounters and combinations that are often...

"This history is a culinary romp through 50 dishes that shaped humanity-from prehistoric roasted mammoth to space-age dehydrated soup"--