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

For him, Mussolini’s totalitarianism, like Minos’s tyranny, aspired to possess every-thing—every aspect of the life of its citizens. The above represents the biographical information provided by the publisher for the most recent book by this author that BookBrowse has covered. If you are looking for a more expansive biography, you may wish to do an internet search for the author’s website or social media presence.

If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new. The first times hominins used tools, as shown by the behavior of our chimpanzee cousins, might well have been to root out tasty grubs, ants, and termites. One of the most convincing explanations for why our species learned to master fire was that meat tasted so much better roasted than raw. Hunger and famine probably called the shots at many points in our story, but I believe that—ever-adaptable omnivores that we are—the reason we bothered going over the hilltop, or to the far side of the river, was often to discover how things tasted over there. Our spread as a species, in other words, was driven by our penchant for adventurous eating. Global heating, pollution, overfishing, and habitat destruction mean that the rate of species extinction is hundreds of times faster than it has been in the last ten million years.

Humanity’s backup plan, unfortunately, is to keep the seeds and semen of plants and livestock in gene banks. There’s a gene bank for olives in Cordoba, Spain, another for wheat in Morocco, for corn in Mexico, and the mother of them all, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which is located north of the Arctic Circle on an island halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole. The problem is that seeds kept inert in cold storage aren’t evolving with and adapting to changes in the environment. Agrobiodiversity, which refers to the range of plants and livestock that feed us, is also in decline. A tenth of the 6,000 or so breeds of domesticated animals used in agriculture are already extinct.

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Relying on original recipes and evidence from the organic remains, they were able to recreate this umami-rich sauce made of small, fermented fish. They recruited top chefs in the city of Cadiz, Spain to cook with their recreated garum. I got to sample some of their dishes, and the results were spectacular. I wanted to do the same for Rome as I’d done for Shanghai—bring a lost city, the Rome of a century ago, back to life. Fortunately, there’s hope for the future of food—though the solution might strike some as counterintuitive.

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Lauro wrote his own version of the story of Icarus, a verse play called Icaro. He was always fas-cinated by flight—he’d been sketching winged horses in the margins of his books since he was a schoolboy. When he finally decided to take action against the Fascists—whose rise he’d at first watched with detachment—his heroic gesture of resistance took the form of a night flight over Rome.

So he regularly puts chapulines, which are sort of lime-toasted crickets, into his tortilla and into his burritos. He’s always been into relatively extreme foods like kalamata olives and capers, that kind of thing. I think we’re seeing an even greater narrowing of diversity, the way things are going. So those three revolutions sort of brought us to where we are today, and a lot of people are saying it’s time to tap the brakes, that the food system is broken. Then there’s the green revolution, which really kicked things into overdrive starting in the 1960s, where you’re bringing the power of fossil fuels along with fertilizers, along with new breeds of wheat that can feed the millions and the billions.

Taras Grescoe

According to some estimates, a quarter of the 8.7 million known author Taras Grescoe plant and animal species alive today are likely to become extinct over the next few decades. I try to delve into the sources of this conflicted relationship in the book. At its apogee under the Roman Empire, the city became Caput Mundi, the capital of the world, with a population of 1.4 million. By the sixteenth century, the population had shrunk to 25,000.

In the tradition of Michael Pollan, Anthony Bourdain, and Mark Bittman, an exciting and globe-trotting account of ancient cuisines—from Neolithic bread to ancient Roman fish sauce—and why reviving the foods of the past is the key to saving the future. I was just visiting the Roman ruins of Baelo Claudia, east of Cádiz in Spain, as part of the research. The subject is the archeology of taste, and how attempts to revive lost and forgotten foods are offering hope for the future of food in a time of diminishing biodiversity. On a global level, we have Trump who wants to MAGA—just as Mussolini wanted to Make Italy Great Again after her “mutilated victory” in the First World War, in which she was seen as hav-ing been short-changed in the spoils of war by the other Allied powers. The past Mussolini wanted to revive, in Rome and the rest of the country, was the glory days of the Roman Empire under Augustus.

The best hope for important species is to find their wild relatives, plant them, cultivate them—and eat them. When it comes to food, the secret to time travel is that humans alive today are identical in physique, intelligence, and problem-solving abilities to just about anybody who has lived in the last sixty thousand years. When confronted with a problem—like how to build shelter or assemble a meal—our ancestors drew on the same set of innate capacities that we possess today. Once you know that, the only things you need to go into the past are curiosity and imagination. Visit Author Central to update your books, profile picture, and biography.