Food Fights & Culture Wars: A Secret History of Taste Hardcover – March 14, 2017

The pages are laid out in framed boxes of words and pictures. It's an interesting design concept but it breaks up the flow of the copy and makes reading more difficult than it has to be.

I am buying this book for friends and family for Christmas because it is the perfect coffee table book. The author had access to the collection of the British Library so the many illustrations are very unusual and very cool. It is also a book that has fascinating tidbits on every page, so you really can pick it up, turn to any page, look at some pictures and come away having learned something.

Promising recipe, bland presentation. History of food should be fascinating, but author wanders astray attempting to infuse historical cuisine with social inequality ... repeatedly denounces historic cookbooks as written for the rich, apparently unaware most poor were illiterate before the 18th century and unlikely to spend money on cookbooks ... we learn colonial Europeans were hypocrites for denouncing cannibalism because European literature was obsessed with cannibalism, e.g., children's story "Jack and the Beanstalk" (!?). Author finds a way to transform interesting subjects into boredom, e.g., the history of dinner parties is unreadable, and the Bovril chapter seems endless. Almost nothing about restaurants, although rich & poor alike ate out as far back as ancient Rome.

Very entertaining, well researched and information that is startling but fun.

Do NOT buy the Kindle edition! The original Kindle edition faithfully reproduced the inspired page layout and typography of the original printed version, but the text was too small to read. The updated version can be read on the Kindle, but lost all of the page layout and typography and twisted the figures all out of shape, and decreased their resolution. Both the original Kindle edition and the updated one suck royally. Get the print version.

Such a treat to read with all the wonderful illustrations

Beware. There is problem with this book on Kindle. It is not working properly. Pages zoom past with one click and the font size cannot be adjusted. The publisher needs to fix the problems.The hard copy book has had some great newspaper reviews. I returned my Kindle edition and am eagerly awaiting the book in hard copy.

Bravo! Bravo! And bravo the third time at least! Thank you for your time to write it! I‘d like to have all the knowledge you should kept just in your head, as in printed version you couldn‘t share with your readers all! Truly amazing! Greetings from the gourment world Zermatt, Switzerland!

Lovely book, takes an eclectic look at a number of oft forgotten and little known food trends (lemonade drinkers during the Black Death!). Sharp, engaging, informative tone and a wonderful selection of illustrations. A real dip into and read again book that's a pleasure to own.

Really not that interesting. Not well researched. A few funny facts, but a bit more opinionated than factual

a very interesting subject.

I love this book