Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (Volume 43) (California Studies in Food and Culture)

Rachel Laudan tells the remarkable story of the rise and fall of the worlds great cuisinesfrom the mastery of grain cooking some twenty thousand years ago, to the presentin this superbly researched book. 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 philosophybeliefs about health, the economy, politics, society and the godsprompted the construction of new cuisines, a handful of which, chosen as the cuisines of empires, came to dominate the globe. Cuisine and Empire shows how merchants, missionaries, and the military took cuisines over mountains, oceans, deserts, and across political frontiers. Laudans innovative narrative treats cuisine, like language, clothing, or architecture, as something constructed by humans. By emphasizing how cooking turns farm products into food and by taking the globe rather than the nation as the stage, she challenges the agrarian, romantic, and nationalistic myths that underlie the contemporary food movement.