The great French food writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously wrote: “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.” Two centuries later in Dinner in Rome, the Norwegian writer and chef Andreas Viestad has taken that “you” and applied it to the whole of humanity. From the titular meal he extracts a potted history of the world: from the growth of its population, through the rise and fall of its empires, to the development of its economies.
Review of Dinner in Rome: A History of the World in One Meal by Andreas Viestad for the FT