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4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019
Copyright © Bee Wilson 2019
Bee Wilson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Diagrams redrawn by Martin Brown
Cover photographs © Shutterstock
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Source ISBN: 9780008240769
Ebook Edition © Jan 2019 ISBN: 9780008240776
Version: 2019-02-12
For Leo
‘Ever the eaters and drinkers, ever the upward and downward sun, ever the air and the ceaseless tides’
Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’
Contents
INTRODUCTION: The Gatherers and the Hunted
EPILOGUE: New Food on Old Plates
Pick a bunch of green grapes, wash it, and put one in your mouth. Feel the grape with your tongue, observe how cold and refreshing it is: the crisp flesh, and the jellylike interior with its mild, sweet flavour.
Eating grapes can feel like an old pleasure, untouched by change. The ancient Greeks and Romans loved to eat grapes, as well as to drink them in the form of wine. The Odyssey speaks of ‘a ripe and luscious vine, hung thick with grapes’. As you pull the next delicious grape from its stalk, you could easily be plucking it from a Dutch still life of the seventeenth century, where grapes are tumbled on a metal platter with oysters and half-peeled lemons.
But look closer at this bunch of green grapes, cold from the fridge, and you see that they are not unchanged after all. Like so many other foods, grapes have become a piece of engineering designed to please
