The Lost Supper, Taras Grescoe
The Lost Supper, Taras Grescoe
List: $25.99 | Sale: $18.20
Club: $12.99

The Lost Supper
Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past

Author: Taras Grescoe

Narrator: Tim Fannon

Unabridged: 13 hr 1 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 09/19/2023


Synopsis

The world can't sustain the way we eat today. Whether it’s ultra-processed oils, factoryfarmed meat, or monoculture wheat, industrial agriculture has increasingly dire consequences for the vibrancy of our plates, health, and planet. While some look to high tech solutions, like
lab-grown meat or transgenic produce, Taras Grescoe argues that the future of our food lies in the diversity of the past.

In The Lost Supper, Grescoe searches for the fascinating flavors, many forgotten or on the verge of extinction, that tell the stories of civilizations: “Aztec caviar” from a vanishing lake in Mexico; garum, the secret umami ingredient of Ancient Roman cuisine; acorn-fed feral pigs on one
of Georgia’s barrier islands; and camas, a staple of Northwest Coast Indigenous Peoples. He chronicles a growing movement of archaeologists, farmers, and food producers who are unearthing and reviving the nourishing, delicious, and sustainable foods of the past—from Neolithic
sourdough and farmhouse cheese to wild olives and long-thought extinct plants—along with chefs and enthusiasts who are bringing history alive in their own kitchens.

A deep dive into the archaeology of taste and an impassioned manifesto for the future of food, The Lost Supper sets out a provocative case: in order to save ourselves, we need to think—and eat—much more like our ancestors did.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Crystal on December 01, 2023

The Lost Supper: A Culinary Journey Through the Evolution of Food by Taras Grescoe is a fascinating exploration of the foods of our ancestral past. As someone particularly interested in ancient Roman cuisine, I was immediately drawn to this book because of Grescoe's extensive research on garum - the......more

Goodreads review by Doug on February 27, 2024

There's some wonderfully entertaining and interesting stuff here, many of the chapters are 5 star worthy. When the author is giving us interesting historical info or entertaining travelogues I loved it. When he was lecturing on the solution to our food system he was much less convincing. The informa......more

Goodreads review by Matthew on December 05, 2023

There's a lot of interesting information here, though I'm conflicted about whether the book needed to be as long as it is. The point could easily have been made with one or two of these "lost" foods, with maybe a third to drive the point home and add some diversity. The length definitely causes the......more

Goodreads review by leslie on September 09, 2023

I really enjoyed this book about slow food and getting back to our food roots. I like history and I like food so the combination kept my interest. The author traveled the world and met with different types of people trying to keep traditonal and old foods alive. I especially found the part about gar......more

Goodreads review by Ellen on October 05, 2023

In The Lost Supper, author Tara’s Grescoe travels the world seeking foods that were once a part of human diets and now are mostly endangered. His first chapter discusses insects, which has real potential to turn many off (he does acknowledge near the end of the book that crickets and worms are never......more