Sometimes I pick up books based solely on their covers. Some of those turn out to be much needed departures from my narrow preferences. Others fail to delight. Food: The History of Taste falls in the second category. It's less a non-fiction book than a series of essays by different academics, mostly historians, that explores the history of food. Chapters are arranged in chronological order, from the archaeology of food to modern cuisine, to convey a sense of progress. It quickly becomes evident, however, that in addition to the different subject matter, chapters also differ in style and quality.
Some of the chapters are exquisitely boring. I skipped Chinese and Islamic cuisine completely and skimmed others. The two final chapters - "Dining Out" and "Novelty and Tradition" - are especially painful. They focus on the last 100 or so years of culinary tradition, which I expected to be the most interesting part. Dining Out, for example, is a 30 page explanation of what a restaurant is. Not how restaurants function or how meals are prepared or how menus are designed, but a stoic academic definition that mostly serves as a reference to other academics. It is inadvertently hilarious at times: "Most restaurants do not open for breakfast and those that do specialize to some extent in this meal." and "The clientele of a restaurant come with their friends, sit apart from others, and pay for a specific meal when they are finished". Leave it to academics to find the least interesting angle to a story.
Novelty and Tradition does somewhat better, by focusing on a surprising driver of food innovation. On one hand, chefs and diners look for traditional foods and tastes that match their expectations. Traditionalists follow recipes to the word, fight to protect regional specialties (like parmesan, feta cheese or falukorv) and look to the past for inspiration. On the other, innovators work to add new things to existing cuisines by improvising and appropriating elements from elsewhere. It's a dynamic process. Today's traditionalists started out as innovators. The public is quick to adapt new trends but never loses its appetite for more novelty. Yet, even this chapter is perhaps twice too long. It's also peppered with mind-numbing sentences like: "To discover when and why and which groups welcomed or rejected various food innovations in the post-war period is an ambitious research programme and hardly any actual investigation has been done in this field."
The actual history of food is surprisingly exciting, and you can catch glimpses of that here. Freedman and his co-authors do a good job of highlighting how today's food industry is dominated by companies founded in the 19th century. These companies were often built on the back of a single product. August Oetker (of Dr. Oetker) invented baking powder. Henri Nestle came up with baby formula and later developed an innovative way to mix milk powder with cocoa beans, which set the chocolate industry in motion. These, and other similar stories, illuminate the everyday world in unexpected ways. Considering the breadth of fascinating material, someone must have written an enlightening book on the history of food. This isn't it.