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From Ancient Rome to the 21st Century, the Incredible Journeys of the Food We Eat
St. Martin's Press
November 2007
On Sale: November 13, 2007
272 pages
ISBN: 0312355351
EAN: 9780312355357
Hardcover
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Historical
Today the average meal has traveled thousands of miles
before reaching the dinner table. How on earth did this
happen? In fact, long-distance food is nothing new and,
since the earliest times, the things we eat and drink have
crossed countries and continents. Through delightful
anecdotes and astonishing facts, Moveable Feasts tells their
stories. For the ancient Romans, the amphora---a torpedo-shaped pot
that fitted snugly into the ship’s hold---was the answer to
moving millions of tons of olive oil from Spain to Italy.
Napoleon offered a reward to anyone who could devise a way
of preserving and transporting food for soldiers. (What he
got was the tin can.) Today temperature-controlled shipping
containers allow companies to send their frozen salmon to
China, where it’s thawed, filleted, refrozen, and sent back
to the United States for sale in supermarkets as “fresh”
Atlantic salmon. Combining history, science, and politics, Financial Times
writer Sarah Murray provides a fascinating glimpse into the
extraordinary odysseys of food from farm to fork. She
encounters everything from American grain falling from
United Nations planes in Sudan to Mumbai’s tiffin men who,
using only bicycles, carts, and their feet, deliver more
than 170,000 lunches a day. Following the items on a grocery store shopping list, Murray
shows how the journeys of food have brought about seismic
shifts in economics, politics, and even art. By flying food
into Berlin during the 1948 airlift, the Allies kept a city
of more than two million alive for more than a year and
secured their first Cold War victory, appealing to German
hearts and minds---and stomachs. In nineteenth-century
Buffalo, the grain elevator (a giant mechanical scooping
machine) not only turned the city into one of America’s
wealthiest, but it also had a profound influence on modern
architecture, giving Bauhaus designers an important source
of inspiration. In a thought-provoking and highly entertaining account,
Moveable Feasts brings an entirely fresh perspective to the
subject of food. And today, as global warming makes
headlines and concerns mount about the “food miles” clocked
by our dinners, Murray poses a contentious question: Is
buying local always the most sustainable, ethical choice?
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