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A Movable Feast: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization

by Kenneth F. Kiple

A MOVABLE FEAST: Ten Millennia of Food Globalization provides a look at the globalization of food from hunter-gatherers to genetically modified plants and animals.  With topics ranging from farming salmon to feasting on fast food, this comprehensive history looks at the transition from foraging to farming, today's obesity epidemic and fast food, and the world that food globalization has created.

Author Kenneth Kiple emphasizes the importance of the Columbian Exchange, a biological and cultural exchange in the New World that began with Columbus's discovery in 1492.  An exchange of simple food crops such as sugar, wheat and chocolate, as well as the less exciting strains of influenza and bubonic plague, the swap transformed European, American, African and Asian ways of life.  Kiple astutely examines what the world has eaten for the last 10,000 years and what impact those choices has had on our eating and lifestyle habits today.