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The Food Chronology:
A Food Lover's Compendium of Events and Anecdotes, from Prehistory to the Present

by James Trager  

Fascinating food facts can be as appealing as mouth-watering recipes. Hence the allure of The Food Chronolgy: A Food Lover's Compendium of Events and Anecdotes, From Prehistory to the Present. From this tour de force, you learn when the first tuna was canned, the first Hershey Kiss introduced, and the first Baci candy made in Italy--all in 1909. In 1995, the hardcover edition of this paperback won the Julia Child Cookbook Award for Best Food Reference. This paperback edition, published in 1997, deluges you with the same information, including material on politics, art, economics, medicine, in all, a total of 50 fields, all related to food.

On the down side, many facts lack a context or sufficient explanation to make them useful. Why, for example, did the Greeks get pepper from India in 431 B.C.? Trivia nuts will have a feast. Researchers may find this farrago of facts poorly organized when tracking information through time. Spotty indexing does not help. Overall, there is an abundance of information with little sense of its significance.
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