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.

We’re getting far more efficient at feeding far more people. He spoke with Galloway about the insect cuisine he had in Mexico — and what the past can teach us about today’s food systems. If you’re ready to boost your happiness, productivity, and general well-being in 2025, start by checking out the best nonfiction of 2024.

Com-pared to Turin and Milan, it’s not really a productive, industrial city—yet it remains a centre of power, for the Church and the national government. In what aspects does the Rome you describe in the book differ from the Rome of today? You write in your book, “To many Italians, the city was a shame-ful symbol of national decline.” This refers to the early 1900s, but it’s a sentence that could very well be written today.

Taras Grescoe author biography, plus links to books by Taras Grescoe.

Like, I’ve gone to Thailand and eaten grubs on the street, that kind of thing. We have an event here in Montreal, the Insectarium, where they do bug tastings and things like that. So I’m not averse to it, but I’ve never found a way to really work them into my diet. That was the one of the big discovers when I was doing this book, the fact that a lot of the food that we ate before really brought this intensity of aroma and flavour, just sensual experience. There was the neolithic revolution which, going back 10,000 years ago we all became settled agriculturalists living in more or less urban cities settings with, you know, a rural hinterland supplying the cities. Before, we were drawing from all these different food webs as hunter-gatherers or foragers or pastoralists.

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.

I believe history can be fascinating, engaging, compel-ling, which is why I constructed this book to be read like a novel. Yet of the ten thousand plants that have nourished Homo sapiens over the millennia, only 150 are cultivated for food today, and just fourteen animal species provide 90 percent of the calories we get from livestock. Since the last two agricultural revolutions, the Industrial and the Green Revolution, we’ve cast our lot with monocultures of a few staple crops, with rice, wheat, corn, soybeans, and sugar cane at the top of the list.

Taras Grescoe, a non-fiction specialist, writes essays, articles, and books. He is the author of Sacré Blues, The End of Elsewhere, The Devil’s Picnic, Bottomfeeder, Straphanger, and most recently, Shanghai Grand. Taras is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Guardian, and National Geographic Traveler.

What eating insects in Mexico taught this Montrealer about food systems

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.

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 Taras Grescoe 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.

From technology to climate action, from psychology to the art of storytelling, 2025 will bring groundbreaking books from all kinds of fascinating fields. The latest research shows that people who have a diverse diet—which means they eat thirty different kinds of plants and animals a week—are significantly freer from disease than even people who eat an exclusively vegan and vegetarian diet. It is a priority for CBC to create products that are accessible to all in Canada including people with visual, hearing, motor and cognitive challenges. The Walrus is located within the bounds of Treaty 13 signed with the Mississaugas of the Credit. This land is also the traditional territory of the Anishnabeg, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. Lauro knew that Mussolini’s actual hold on power was shaky, and based on bluff.

He has served as juror at the Canada Council for the Arts (publishing) and for the Marian Hebb Research Grant. Since the beginning of 2023, he has been a professor of Creative Writing, specializing in literary journalism, at Concordia University in Montreal. Rome, though the population of the comune is now 2.9 million—far bigger than its maximum under the Romans—remains a dysfunctional city.