Hunting, gathering, and Stone Age cooking -- What early agriculturalists ate -- Egypt and the gift of the Nile -- Ancient Judea -- from Eden to kosher laws -- Classical Greece -- wine, olive oil, and trade -- The Alexandrian exchange and the four humors -- Ancient India -- sacred cows and Ayurveda -- Yin and Yang of classical Chinese cuisine -- Dining in republican and imperial Rome -- Early Christianity -- food rituals and asceticism -- Europe's Dark Ages and Charlemagne -- Islam -- a thousand and one nights of cooking -- Carnival in the High Middle Ages -- International Gothic cuisine -- A Renaissance in the kitchen -- Aztecs and the roots of Mexican cooking -- 1492 -- globalization and fusion cuisines -- 16th century manners and reformation diets -- Papal Rome and the Spanish Golden Age -- The birth of French haute cuisine -- Elizabethan England, Puritans, country food -- Dutch treat -- coffee, tea, sugar, tobacco -- African and Aboriginal cuisines -- Edo, Japan -- Samurai dining and Zen aesthetics -- Colonial cookery in North America -- Eating in the early Industrial Revolution -- Romantics, vegetarians, utopians -- First restaurants, chefs, and gastronomy -- Big business and the homogenization of food -- Food imperialism around the World -- Immigrant cuisines and ethnic restaurants -- War, nutritionism, and the Great Depression -- World War II and the advent of fast food -- Counterculture -- from hippies to foodies -- Science of new dishes and new organisms -- The past as prologue?