History of fruit accompanied by 300 color illustrations, and biographies of their illustrators.

"A comprehensive and entertaining historical and botanical review, providing an enjoyable and cognitive read.”—Nature The foods we eat have a deep and often surprising past. From almonds and apples to tea and rice, many foods that we consume today have histories that can be traced out of prehistoric Central Asia along the tracks of the Silk Road to kitchens in Europe, America, China, and elsewhere in East Asia. The exchange of goods, ideas, cultural practices, and genes along these ancient routes extends back five thousand years, and organized trade along the Silk Road dates to at least Han Dynasty China in the second century BC. Balancing a broad array of archaeological, botanical, and historical evidence, Fruit from the Sands presents the fascinating story of the origins and spread of agriculture across Inner Asia and into Europe and East Asia. Through the preserved remains of plants found in archaeological sites, Robert N. Spengler III identifies the regions where our most familiar crops were domesticated and follows their routes as people carried them around the world. With vivid examples, Fruit from the Sands explores how the foods we eat have shaped the course of human history and transformed cuisines all over the globe.

In Kimberly Quiogue Andrews's award-winning full-length debut, A Brief History of Fruit, we are shuttled between the United States and the Philippines in the search for a sense of geographical and racial belonging. Driven by a restless need to interrogate the familial, environmental, and political forces that shape the self, these poems are both sensual and cerebral: full of "the beautiful science," as she puts it, of "naming: trees of one thing, then another, then yet another." Colonization, class dynamics, an abiding loneliness, and a place's titular fruit--tiny Filipino limes, the frozen berries of rural America--all serve as focal markers in a book that insists that we hold life's whole fragrant pollination in our hands and look directly at it, bruises and all. Throughout, these searching, fiercely intelligent and formally virtuosic poems offer us a vital new perspective on biracial identity and the meaning of home, one that asks us again and again: "what does it mean, really, to live in a country?"

"Award-winning journalist Dan Koeppel navigates across the planet and throughout history, telling the cultural and scientific story of the world's most ubiquitous fruit"--Page 4 of cover.

The Fruits of Empire is a history of American expansion through the lens of art and food. In the decades after the Civil War, Americans consumed an unprecedented amount of fruit as it grew more accessible with advancements in refrigeration and transportation technologies. This excitement for fruit manifested in an explosion of fruit imagery within still life paintings, prints, trade cards, and more. Images of fruit labor and consumption by immigrants and people of color also gained visibility, merging alongside the efforts of expansionists to assimilate land and, in some cases, people into the national body. Divided into five chapters on visual images of the grape, orange, watermelon, banana, and pineapple, this book demonstrates how representations of fruit struck the nerve of the nation’s most heated debates over land, race, and citizenship in the age of high imperialism.

Contains Latin names of the fruits and vegetables, historical information on when the item first appeared, its country of origin, its first recorded use, and classical and Biblical literary references. Includes also information about the medicinal and nutritional properties of the items and how these properties were first discovered.

"First published in the United Kingdom by Ebury Press in 2015."--Title page verso.