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Cuisine and Culture: A History of Food & People
An illuminating account of how history shapes our diets
Throughout history, food has played a critical and defining part in individual cultures and the overall development of civilization. Cuisine and Culture presents an engaging, informative, and amazing story of the interaction among history, culture, and food that draws connections between major historical events and how and why these events affected and defined the culinary traditions of different societies.
Covering prehistory and the earliest societies around the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers to today's celebrity chefs, Cuisine and Culture is a multicultural and multiethnic approach to food and history, providing enlightening answers to many such questions as:
* How did the French establish a notable reputation in world cuisine?
* Where does American cuisine have its roots?
* How has food been used to control populations and as a weapon during war?
* How did the Romans come to believe cinnamon grew in swamps guarded by giant killer bats?
* Why did some restaurants print their own money?
Complete with sample recipes and menus, as well as revealing photographs and illustrations, Cuisine and Culture is an important resource for people interested in food history.
Throughout history, food has played a critical and defining part in individual cultures and the overall development of civilization. Cuisine and Culture presents an engaging, informative, and amazing story of the interaction among history, culture, and food that draws connections between major historical events and how and why these events affected and defined the culinary traditions of different societies.
Covering prehistory and the earliest societies around the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers to today's celebrity chefs, Cuisine and Culture is a multicultural and multiethnic approach to food and history, providing enlightening answers to many such questions as:
* How did the French establish a notable reputation in world cuisine?
* Where does American cuisine have its roots?
* How has food been used to control populations and as a weapon during war?
* How did the Romans come to believe cinnamon grew in swamps guarded by giant killer bats?
* Why did some restaurants print their own money?
Complete with sample recipes and menus, as well as revealing photographs and illustrations, Cuisine and Culture is an important resource for people interested in food history.
384 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
33 people are currently reading
808 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
December 11, 2010
I tried to like this book. Surely such a fascinating topic would be handled gently and with care, right?
Alas.
The first 100 pages paint the past tastes in broad generalizations and hazy historical conclusions. While I hesitate to describe any book as "juvenile" this one gave me the feeling that I was being talked down to.
I think this book would probably work well as a great introduction, but needs some support by other books (such as Tannahill's Food in History.
Alas.
The first 100 pages paint the past tastes in broad generalizations and hazy historical conclusions. While I hesitate to describe any book as "juvenile" this one gave me the feeling that I was being talked down to.
I think this book would probably work well as a great introduction, but needs some support by other books (such as Tannahill's Food in History.
March 1, 2014
I was assigned this book for a class on Food, Wine, & Culture but had I discovered it on my own I would have read it anyway. The book traces the roles and types of food through history, from hunter-gatherer days to the present. It talks of how cultures, religions, medical "experts" of the time, and especially travel have influenced what people around the globe eat. I found this to be as a much a history lesson as it was a lesson on cuisine.
However, the book has issues, and for that I knocked its rating down two full stars. First, despite the author holding a degree in English from Vassar she does not write well. This volume is rife with awkward sentences that I had to re-read in order to parse their meaning. But what's worse is are the inaccuracies. Civitello at one point describes the hump on the Brahman cattle as being filled with water, like a camel's hump. By now I thought even children knew that was a fallacy and the hump is actually just fatty tissue. And by reading other reviews of this book it seems this was not the only factual error, and because of that I have to take the rest of the book with a grain of salt.
However, the book has issues, and for that I knocked its rating down two full stars. First, despite the author holding a degree in English from Vassar she does not write well. This volume is rife with awkward sentences that I had to re-read in order to parse their meaning. But what's worse is are the inaccuracies. Civitello at one point describes the hump on the Brahman cattle as being filled with water, like a camel's hump. By now I thought even children knew that was a fallacy and the hump is actually just fatty tissue. And by reading other reviews of this book it seems this was not the only factual error, and because of that I have to take the rest of the book with a grain of salt.
February 11, 2019
I was attracted to this book by its global scope ; however, I was disappointed to discover that it is written for a reader with no knowledge of the past, and thus, at least four-fifths of the text are devoted to a rote retelling of history, leaving little room for the subject promised by the title. Perhaps this book is aimed at culinary students straight out of high school. Too bad, as an educated history of food around the world would be most interesting.
March 5, 2018
I borrowed this from a friend who read it for a History of Food course, and I found it very readable despite being a sort of textbook. It’s basically a brief history of the world with an emphasis on what people ate. (And it is pretty heavily weighted toward western/American history.)
I’m counting this for the Social Science category of Book Riot’s 2018 Read Harder challenge.
I’m counting this for the Social Science category of Book Riot’s 2018 Read Harder challenge.
September 7, 2025
Linda Civitello’s Cuisine and Culture: A History of Food & People is one of those sweeping, ambitious books that feels like you’re being handed a backstage pass to the entire history of humanity—except the story is told through what we’ve eaten, how we’ve cooked it, and what it has meant to us.
If Ken Albala’s Beans zooms in on a single food to show its global resonance, Civitello zooms way out, offering a panoramic narrative where food is inseparable from politics, religion, trade, conquest, and cultural identity.
The book is structured like a journey through time: beginning with prehistoric hunter-gatherers, moving through ancient civilisations like Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome, pausing at mediaeval banquets, tracing the Columbian Exchange, diving into the rise of sugar and coffeehouses, and eventually landing in the industrialised food systems of today. At every stop, Civitello shows how what ended up on the table was never incidental—it was the result of migrations, wars, religious prohibitions, class distinctions, and scientific revolutions.
What makes her approach so compelling is that she doesn’t just describe “what people ate”. She asks, 'Why did they eat that, how did they get it, and what did it mean?' In the Middle Ages, food was heavily symbolic—banquets weren’t just meals; they were theatre, designed to reinforce hierarchies. In early modern Europe, the influx of new foods from the Americas (tomatoes, potatoes, chocolate, and maize) didn’t just diversify diets; they transformed economies, altered agricultural practices, and even changed demographics by reducing famine. In colonial contexts, food reveals power: who produces, who consumes, and who profits.
Civitello also takes seriously the role of women, often overlooked in grand histories. She reminds us that kitchens have always been both sites of oppression and spaces of creativity, where women carried traditions, preserved identities, and often innovated under constraint. Likewise, she highlights enslaved and marginalised peoples whose culinary labour built empires, even as their contributions were erased or appropriated.
One of the book’s strengths is how it weaves together culinary detail with broader cultural shifts. When discussing the French Revolution, she doesn’t just talk about guillotines and political pamphlets—she talks about bread riots, the symbolism of hunger, and how access to food shaped revolutionary fervour. When exploring the Industrial Revolution, she shows how mechanisation, canning, and processed food didn’t simply make life easier; they changed taste itself, altering what people thought food should look and feel like.
Civitello is at her best when she connects the dots between food and identity. Italian cuisine, for instance, is shown not as an eternal tradition but as a construction shaped by unification, migration, and marketing. American cuisine is revealed as a restless hybrid, born of indigenous foodways, African contributions, European imports, and waves of immigration. Even today’s debates about “authenticity” and “fusion” echo these older negotiations.
If there’s a through-line in the book, it’s that food is history in edible form. Every meal carries traces of trade routes, conquests, technological inventions, and cultural encounters. Food is not peripheral to history—it is history, materialised on a plate.
This book is a masterclass in connecting the kitchen to the wider world. Scholarly yet accessible, packed with anecdotes yet grounded in careful research, it’s a book that makes you see your next meal differently. Perfect for students of food history, but also for curious general readers who want to understand how human civilisation has always been—quite literally—fed.
If Ken Albala’s Beans zooms in on a single food to show its global resonance, Civitello zooms way out, offering a panoramic narrative where food is inseparable from politics, religion, trade, conquest, and cultural identity.
The book is structured like a journey through time: beginning with prehistoric hunter-gatherers, moving through ancient civilisations like Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome, pausing at mediaeval banquets, tracing the Columbian Exchange, diving into the rise of sugar and coffeehouses, and eventually landing in the industrialised food systems of today. At every stop, Civitello shows how what ended up on the table was never incidental—it was the result of migrations, wars, religious prohibitions, class distinctions, and scientific revolutions.
What makes her approach so compelling is that she doesn’t just describe “what people ate”. She asks, 'Why did they eat that, how did they get it, and what did it mean?' In the Middle Ages, food was heavily symbolic—banquets weren’t just meals; they were theatre, designed to reinforce hierarchies. In early modern Europe, the influx of new foods from the Americas (tomatoes, potatoes, chocolate, and maize) didn’t just diversify diets; they transformed economies, altered agricultural practices, and even changed demographics by reducing famine. In colonial contexts, food reveals power: who produces, who consumes, and who profits.
Civitello also takes seriously the role of women, often overlooked in grand histories. She reminds us that kitchens have always been both sites of oppression and spaces of creativity, where women carried traditions, preserved identities, and often innovated under constraint. Likewise, she highlights enslaved and marginalised peoples whose culinary labour built empires, even as their contributions were erased or appropriated.
One of the book’s strengths is how it weaves together culinary detail with broader cultural shifts. When discussing the French Revolution, she doesn’t just talk about guillotines and political pamphlets—she talks about bread riots, the symbolism of hunger, and how access to food shaped revolutionary fervour. When exploring the Industrial Revolution, she shows how mechanisation, canning, and processed food didn’t simply make life easier; they changed taste itself, altering what people thought food should look and feel like.
Civitello is at her best when she connects the dots between food and identity. Italian cuisine, for instance, is shown not as an eternal tradition but as a construction shaped by unification, migration, and marketing. American cuisine is revealed as a restless hybrid, born of indigenous foodways, African contributions, European imports, and waves of immigration. Even today’s debates about “authenticity” and “fusion” echo these older negotiations.
If there’s a through-line in the book, it’s that food is history in edible form. Every meal carries traces of trade routes, conquests, technological inventions, and cultural encounters. Food is not peripheral to history—it is history, materialised on a plate.
This book is a masterclass in connecting the kitchen to the wider world. Scholarly yet accessible, packed with anecdotes yet grounded in careful research, it’s a book that makes you see your next meal differently. Perfect for students of food history, but also for curious general readers who want to understand how human civilisation has always been—quite literally—fed.
October 29, 2018
If you have an appreciation for the history of recipes and the delight of old fashioned cuisine that has created the culinary sciences, then Linda Civitello's book titled: Cuisine and Culture are for you. It was even more intriguing to me because of the popularity of the culinary sciences, shows, and chef celebrities. Utmost, people whom serve food are being recognized for their expertise is keeping food safe to eat and prepared with great care and dignity. Consequently, get this, these practices have been part of the culinary history since ancient civilization! It has not only improved my outlook on this dynamic and cultured career path, but has made me realize that cooking is imperative to a well kept society. Even if it is for a plate at a time, or catering an elaborate extravaganza, this book made me realize that there has been an enormous amount of care given to help people satisfy their palettes.
Thank you to Linda Civitello for inviting the reader into an enriching ancient and dramatic experience of the gastronomic senses!
Thank you to Linda Civitello for inviting the reader into an enriching ancient and dramatic experience of the gastronomic senses!
July 17, 2020
A good read. But still had more of a Western slant than I was expecting. It gets a little verbose at times, but there's a lot of interesting nuggets in here.
July 14, 2023
Interesting but quite superficial and lacking of details. The last few chapters of the book are heavily centered in US
August 19, 2018
The author is overly simplistic at times. The idea that Greeks honored hospitality - this was the situation in almost all of the ancient cultures - due to the harsh geographical features of the distances between the Greek cities - and similar reductionist comments - sounds for me totally simplistic and lacking academic depth and insight. Can however be read as a pastime book with a bowl of popcorn within reach, nothing more.
April 29, 2012
This was a great history lesson all directed around food and culture. I got this book for cooking school, and we only had to read a handful of passages from it. BY the end of the class I knew I wanted to read the whole thing cover to cover.
The most fascinating part of the book for me was how much war affected the world's cuisine. It's impossible to say that any style of cuisine is genuinely unique to a particular culture, since so many ideas and foods have been spread around over the centuries. I was disappointed that the author seemed to gloss over the last few centuries, though. She gave more of a political history and didn't focus on food very much at all. I suppose that since most of the changes in food culture around the world really have happened over the last few hundred years, one could write a whole other book just on that. But the author seemed to "skip over" a lot of that and instead wrapped up the book by listing world events.
Anyway, I have a lot of bookmarks in this one. Overall it was a good read, and definitely something I'll refer back to many times.
The most fascinating part of the book for me was how much war affected the world's cuisine. It's impossible to say that any style of cuisine is genuinely unique to a particular culture, since so many ideas and foods have been spread around over the centuries. I was disappointed that the author seemed to gloss over the last few centuries, though. She gave more of a political history and didn't focus on food very much at all. I suppose that since most of the changes in food culture around the world really have happened over the last few hundred years, one could write a whole other book just on that. But the author seemed to "skip over" a lot of that and instead wrapped up the book by listing world events.
Anyway, I have a lot of bookmarks in this one. Overall it was a good read, and definitely something I'll refer back to many times.
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August 9, 2011Cocina y Cultura. De los placeres del hombre, que matan o engordan, la comida tiene la maldita característica que puede hacer las dos cosas, primero te engorda y luego te mata. Pero no hay que ser tan negativo. No se puede negar, amamos los alimentos. También amamos las situaciones en que ingerimos alimentos. Ya sea en un pic-nic en el parque o la cena de una boda, o la celebración de alguna fiesta del pueblo. Tenemos alimentos para todas las ocasiones, fiestas y festejos. Festejamos a los vivos, a los muertos, un triunfo, un negocio, un nuevo ciclo, en fin. La cocina también es cultura y se puede conocer la personalidad de un Pueblo a través de su gastronomía. Y este libro habla de eso. de como la situación histórica de cada región ha afectado directamente el modo de preparar sus alimentos. A través de los siglos, desde los tiempos de las cavernas, no importa la región, el color o el idioma, El Hombre se reúne con amigos y familiares a disfrutar y compartir sus alimentos.
January 28, 2017
I originally started reading this book many years ago and stopped around chapter 4. I was mostly annoyed at how poorly it was organized and how many things in it were just wrong. Now that I've finished the book, my original assessment is still the same. There are many things that are incorrect in the text, and there are clear biases to Europe and American cuisine. Many topics are poorly introduced or researched. For the trivia in it, the book is still interesting, but reader beware - some of the facts are not fully fleshed out or wrong. I see that there are later editions (I have the 2nd edition), and I hope the author has improved the text (there are places where it reads like a high school report) and has done a more thorough job of researching the variety of topics. Given the scope this book was supposed to cover, I found many topics were just given a short description and no context.
January 25, 2008
A journey through human history and the evolution of cuisine. Not very deep in its coverage of history or cuisine. I found at least two glaring inaccuracies (Indian indentured workers, including Gandhi, being imported to South Africa to build railroad, Gandhi being a Hindu religious leader - both incorrect. Gandhi went to SA to practice as a lawyer. He was a politician. Not a religious leader.) about Indian history and food. I suspect there are inaccuracies about other regions of the world I am not familiar with.
August 12, 2012
was not able to put this down. so much food history in chronological order from the beginning of civilization. it covers cultural blending via war and exploration. i firmly believe that food make a people not the borders drawn on a globe by the grand mcnally company. patriotism is dead. but being proud of the ingredients available in your geo-location and what your culture has done with those ingredients is much the right way to go.
it reads like an encyclopedia but it is the story of us, and all the wonderful food we have and how it came to be.
it reads like an encyclopedia but it is the story of us, and all the wonderful food we have and how it came to be.
November 27, 2012
over all enjoyable, but there are several factual errors. For example, the author states that the Nanaimo bar was invented in 1983, for a recipe contest. In reality, the contest was for the best nanaimo bar. They have been around a very long time...better fact checking for edition four, this is one expensive ebook, and to have errors is mildly annoying.
April 23, 2017
This book was really expansive -- but was not always accurate. I did learn a thing or two, but all in all it felt really fluffy. It skimmed over a lot, as is the case with a lot of these overview books, but it also didn't really spend time on the food relevant to the topics at hand. I think a more curated and edited approach would have benefited this one.
March 6, 2009
really gripping stuff about food through the ages and trivia addicts will find loads to entertain them here. most of it is very western oriented which is to be expected but at least she gets the few eastern bits right
April 22, 2009
This was a fascinating subject about which to read. I adored the inclusion of the recipes and the comparisons and contrasts to traditional versus modern cuisine.
February 26, 2011
I recommend this for any foodie or historian. Great cultural information with recipes included from the past. Interesting read so far.
September 21, 2013
Very simplistic food writing. Tries to cover so many topics that it reads like a high school history book (ie: makes sweeping cultural and historical generalities).
January 24, 2013
Cuisine and Culture: A HIstory of Food & People by Linda Civitello
Extremely knowledgeable book.. love it
Extremely knowledgeable book.. love it
February 21, 2018
This is a fun way to connect the dots between historical events in the theme of culinary evolution.
December 15, 2018
A lot of events need fact-checking and broader explanations. I could not finisg reading.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews