This book presents a broad, global look at food culture both past and present. The author, an economist, psychologist and chef by training, is uniquely equipped to help us navigate the geopolitical dimension of food, offering a new vision of our culinary landscape. He demonstrates how western industrialism, consumer culture and fast food, while pervasive in the modern west, are in reality clashing with traditional culinary cultures such as ancient China’s, that has its nutritional basis in health and healing. The author goes on to reveal an ongoing tendency both today and throughout history to make use of and promote local products, techniques, culinary concepts and ideas about nutrition. To further illustrate, Boudan takes us on a fascinating historical tour of world gastronomy at the threshold of other great expansive geopolitical movements: the great spread of the East throughout Europe, the Spanish colonization of the Americas, the influence of Islam on Eastern cookery, Turkish cuisine on the Mediterranean world, the impact of formal French cuisine from the Ancien Régime, and ultimately the advancement of Anglo-American cuisine in our present time.