Emeritus of Food and Health at UCD, Mike Gibney is the ideal person for the task.
Something of an iconoclast when it comes to food and food production, he gets down to it straight off, debunking “the media food police” who bemoan that children don’t know where milk comes from. “The reality is that few of us know how food gets to the point of sale, be it on the high street or in the farmers’ market” he writes.
But he does, in extensive but light-touch detail. Each chapter of this engaging history opens with a poem, “to remind the reader that this is a book about the love of food” and not an academic tome.
Within is a history of cereals, soups, pastas and staple as well as the exotic foods we consume. It tells the story of food from the ground to the table, but is also infused with Gibney’s quirky take on the things we eat, but largely take for granted.
Catherine of Braganza, who married King Charles II in 1661, was responsible for introducing tea to fashionable London, for instance. The way she drank it (with three fingers and the ‘pinky’ clearly extended) “goes back to the three-fingered dining by the wealthy and the five-finger dining by the hoi polloi.”
Imagine a world without knife or fork?
Appropriately the humble spud, although now in decline here, has its rightful place. Population growth and decline, famine and emigration, indeed our entire modern history is intertwined with the tuber.
Who knew that Giuseppe Cerve opened the first fish and chip shop in Dublin, in the 1880s in Great Brunswick Street, or that his wife said to customers “one of this, one of that” pointing separately to the fish and chips, and giving rise to the term ‘one and one.’
This book is packed with such information, useless or otherwise, but always highly entertaining and informative, not to mention some delightful poetry and illustrations.
