Food and food studies are quite trendy these days. We are bombarded daily with reminders of this fact: Celebrity chefs opening new restaurants, reviews of yet another “hot” show on the Food Network, cookbooks and diet guides gracing the best-seller lists, slick magazines such as Gastronomica at the newsstands, routine editorial hand-wringing over obesity “epidemics,” and nutrition nags such as Marian Nestle and Jane Brody offering up clockwork denunciations of one or another tasty morsel. Oh, and tell-all accounts about why French women eat and eat and don’t get fat!

The scholarly realm has been affected by this phenomenon as well. Virtually everything edible now has its historian—from eggs to apples, as the Romans used to say, or perhaps better yet, from cumin to kumquats—and cooking styles, eating implements, and table manners are being scrutinized as never before. The origins of restaurants, the history of tipping (not to say tippling!), and ethnographic takes on the world of waitressing (not one, but two such studies appeared in the 1990s, both with the delicious title Dishing It Out) are just a few of the subjects being examined by scholars these days.

No individual has contributed more than Kenneth F. Kiple to the upsurge in scholarly interest in food. For over thirty years now, he has been publishing important work in this area, and The Cambridge World History of Food (hereinafter CWHF [Cambridge, 2000]), the two-volume compendium he coedited with Kriemhild C. Ornelas, has quickly become not only the standard reference source on the subject, but also the point of departure for many a dissertation, treatise, and tome.

Kiple's A Movable Feast is, more than anything else, an attempt to distill—by which I mean to extract and concentrate rather than to vaporize—the vast amount of material included in CWHF. To be sure, Kiple employs other sources (as well as some new research of his own), but A Movable Feast should be seen primarily as a synthetic companion to CWHF. The new book has a thesis of sorts—that food globalization began with the Neolithic Revolution about 10,000–12,000 years ago and has been proceeding at varying velocities ever since—but A Movable Feast is rather more a larder of information about food history than a thesis-driven book. And what a stocked (maybe overstocked) larder it is.

A Movable Feast is divided into twenty-eight short chapters (some chronological and some thematic) wherein Kiple traces the history of food from the heyday of the hunter-gatherers to the age of Mickey D’s. Each chapter is loaded with up-to-date and accurate information regarding various and sundry topics relating to food and nutrition, topics ranging from strategies of food acquisition to methods of cooking and food preparation, and from the radiation and diffusion of plants around the globe to innovations in food processing and distribution. Given our guide's bona fides, it is not surprising that in this cook's tour of food history over la longue durée we learn many, many discrete facts—facts about the deleterious consequences of Neolithic agriculture to human health, about the nutritional quality and qualities of different plants and animals, about the profound effects of technological change on agricultural productivity, and about the complex and convoluted interactions between food and culture across space and time, to name just a few areas—but from this tour, like many such tours, one comes away exhausted. To paraphrase a bit, if it's Tuesday, these must be Belgian endives!

A Movable Feast, moreover, reads at times less like a well-wrought work of history than a revved-up research report, which, come to think of it, is what the book really is. Each and every paragraph, that is to say, is chockablock with information (and sometimes with controversy), but the author never slows down and seldom looks back. To say this is not to denigrate Kiple's new volume, which I found both useful and interesting, but to let readers know what is in store for them. At the end of the day, A Movable Feast, however savory, whets one's appetite for a much more sumptuous and leisurely meal: the CWHF itself. Slow food, anyone?