Felipe Fernandez-Armesto: Food: A history

By MARGIE THOMSON

We are what we eat, we are always being told. But the point Fernandez-Armesto makes at the end of his brilliant history of food and its place in our lives is that we are how we eat as well.

Those of you who have given up on home-cooked family dinners in favour of grab-it-and-run, microwaved meals eaten individually or in front of the television may want to reassess the situation.

Fernandez-Armesto believes strongly that this individualised style of eating, this decline of the meal, is behind many of the ills that plague our civilisation and our families.

"For people who think cooking was the foundation of civilisation, the microwave ... is the last enemy," he says.

Earlier on, in the book's first section in which he investigates what he describes as the "first revolution of food", the invention of cooking, he says, "Eating transmutes the individual into society".

By the time we get to the last chapter, in which he investigates the "eighth revolution" in food history, industrialisation, he is warning that "the first great revolution in the history of food is in danger of being undone".

"The companionship of the campfire, cooking pot and common table, which have helped to bond humans in collaborative living for at least 150,000 years, could be shattered."

Not only does family and community life fragment in the light of such atomised eating patterns, but the way is opened for health problems such as the obesity pandemic, which he points out has coincided with the decline of the meal, and disorders such as anorexia and bulimia.

Divided into eight sections, Fernandez-Armesto's book takes us on a journey through eight revolutions in the history of food: the invention of cooking, the meaning of eating, breeding animals for food, managing plant life for food, food and social rank, food and the long-range exchange of culture, food and ecological exchange, and industrialisation in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Some of his thinking will be familiar to those who have read his earlier works, and many New Zealanders have, thanks to Fernandez-Armesto's attendance here at the first Auckland Writers and Readers Festival.

But there is an irresistible freshness in these pages as he characteristically goes outside the square of received understanding, escoriating the "pigheadedly doctrinaire", and introduces story after story to illustrate his own sense of the history of what is the most basic thing in our lives.

Through oysters (which unlike any other food we often eat "natural", just as our ancestors did), snails (probably the first "cattle", the first creatures herded and bred by people), cannibalism ("human bones snapped for marrow seem to lie under the stones of every civilisation") and onwards through history, perusing the stories behind the great grains that have sustained civilisations, revisiting again the crucial relationship between environments and civilisations, ending with a great moral and epicurian sniff of distaste when he arrives in our era.

Not only do we misuse our resources - for instance, the three billion tons of fish caught in the 20th century exceeded the entire catch of all previous centuries - but we risk pleasure, nourishment, even our health for the sake of convenience.

Yet, surprisingly, he concludes that there are good reasons to be optimistic about the future of food.

"The industrial era is over or ending ... An artisanal reaction is already under way," he declares.

Looking around at the ever-burgeoning number of Burger Kings, McDonald's and Starbucks, one may raise one's eyebrows over this sweeping statement, but Fernandez-Armesto as always is taking the long view.

The great blanding monotony of a world where we all eat the same - the "food in a tablet", or the "paradise of kitchenless homes" that was predicted by the anti-cooking movement as early as 1887 - has never eventuated, largely because they are the antithesis of what it is to be human.

Any real estate agent will tell you he's right: nothing works better on human affection and longing than the smell of home cooking. We've come so far as a species, yet, fundamentally, we haven't changed at all.

Macmillan

$27.95