What We Eat : A Global History of Food

Ketchup seems iconically American, but the word comes from a Southeast Asian anchovy sauce, and today it is made largely from Chinese tomato paste.Japan’s beloved ramen arose from the meeting of Chinese noodles and American wheat flour before attaining worldwide popularity in both gourmet and convenience-food forms.The baguette is mythologized as a product of the French Revolution, but in fact it emerged during late-nineteenth-century urbanization.Colonialism brought baguettes to Vietnam, where street vendors devised a new dish: banh mi, which refugees took with them around the world. Telling these tales and many others, What We Eat explores world history through the lens of the global journeys of nearly ninety food products.Leading historians trace the origins and popularization of items commonly found in supermarkets, showing how each food illuminates wider histories.They consider the tension between the role of cuisine in shaping particular cultural identities and the standardizatio