Ken Albala – Food – A Cultural Culinary History

Below is our curated insight into the wonders, designed to complement the foundational knowledge from the original course description for

Embark on a gastronomic journey through time with Ken Albala’s “Food: A Cultural Culinary History.” This enlightening course offers a deep dive into the evolution of food and its profound impact on human civilization. Designed for food enthusiasts, history buffs, culinary professionals, and anyone intrigued by the intersection of culture, history, and gastronomy, this course weaves a fascinating narrative of how food shapes and is shaped by our world.

Target Audience

This course is ideal for those with a passion for culinary arts and history, including chefs seeking to deepen their understanding of their craft’s roots, culinary students, historians, and anyone curious about the role of food in cultural development. It’s a perfect fit for lifelong learners who appreciate the richness of global food traditions and their influence on modern cuisine.

Key Benefits

• Comprehensive Historical Insight: Gain a broad understanding of food’s journey across major civilizations, from ancient times to the modern era, exploring how culinary practices have evolved and influenced each other.
• Cultural Appreciation: Develop a deeper appreciation for global culinary traditions and the ways in which they reflect and contribute to cultural identity and societal values.
• Enhanced Culinary Perspective: Elevate your culinary practice or appreciation by understanding the historical context and cultural significance of ingredients, dishes, and cooking techniques.

Course Highlights

• Engaging Lectures: Ken Albala brings history to life with his engaging storytelling style, ensuring a captivating learning experience that spans the globe and the ages.
• Rich Content: The course covers a vast array of topics, including the origins of agriculture, the spice trade, dining customs of different cultures, and the impact of industrialization on food production and consumption.
• Interactive Learning Experience: Engage with quizzes, discussion boards, and assignments that reinforce learning and encourage exploration of personal culinary heritage and interests.
• Certificate of Completion: Earn a certificate that recognizes your expanded knowledge and appreciation for culinary history, enhancing your credentials as a culinary professional or enthusiast.

Discover the Story of Food

“Food: A Cultural Culinary History” by Ken Albala offers an unparalleled exploration of food’s central role in human history. Whether you’re looking to enrich your culinary practice with historical context, understand the global tapestry of food cultures, or simply savor the fascinating stories of culinary evolution, this course is your gateway to a deeper understanding and appreciation of food. Enroll now and savor the rich, interconnected story of food and culture.

File Size: 15.5 GB

The following content is directly sourced from the original sale page to provide you with the most authentic information for

Ken Albala – Food – A Cultural Culinary History

Course Overview

Eating is an indispensable human activity. As a result, whether we realize it or not, the drive to obtain food has been a major catalyst across all of history, from prehistoric times to the present. Epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said it best: “Gastronomy governs the whole life of man.”

In fact, civilization itself began in the quest for food. Humanity’s transition to agriculture was not only the greatest social revolution in history, but it directly produced the structures and institutions we call “civilization.”

In every era, the unfolding of history has been intimately tied to the need for food, the production of food, and the culture of food. In all major religions, food choice has been an integral part of religious identity. The quest for spices and exotic foodstuffs led to the European discovery of the New World, as well as to the connecting of the entire globe through trade. In 1840s Ireland a single food—the potato—changed the course of history. Modern warfare, from Napoleon’s conquests to World War II, was made possible by advances in food technology.

In our own times, more people worldwide now recognize the McDonald’s “golden arches” than the Christian cross. Beyond feeding our bodies, food choices and ideologies express social distinctions, as well as our values, concerns, and aspirations. For all of these reasons, food offers a deeply insightful lens on human history, shedding new light on the evolution of social and political systems, on cultural interactions, economic empires, human migrations, and more. Through food culture, we see how primary biological needs have shaped all human lives through the ages. The history of food is the history of human life at its most elemental, its most intimate, its most essential. It’s also a story of ingenuity, creativity, and remarkable human behavior to rival any other aspect of culture.

In Food: A Cultural Culinary History, award-winning Professor Ken Albala of the University of the Pacific puts this extraordinary subject on the table, taking you on an enthralling journey into the human relationship to food. With this innovative course, you’ll travel the world discovering fascinating food lore and culture of all regions and eras—as an eye-opening lesson in history as well as a unique window on what we eat today.

Incorporating extensive study of historical recipes, food preparation techniques from around the world, and activities you can try at home, these 36 colorful lectures take you through the entire spectrum of food history, from the cuisine of ancient Egypt to the great flowering of European cookery in the Middle Ages, and from the celebrity chefs of 18th-century France to our own Zagat- and Michelin-rated restaurant culture. Along the way, you learn in depth about food production and technology in each era; the social, economic, and political factors surrounding food culture; and thinking on diet and eating through the centuries. The result is a compelling inquiry that will change the way you look at both history and food itself.

Food as a Driver of Human History

As context for exploring humanity’s remarkable food cultures, you observe the integral role of food in the unfolding of civilization. From prehistory to our own era, your study includes these seminal subjects:

• The revolutions of agriculture: Learn how agriculture arose in the prehistoric world and how it spurred the development of urban organization, political systems, social classes, militaries, and trade.
• Food and faith: Grasp how food practices became core expressions of religious faith in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, as well as in the Eastern traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism.

• 1492 and food globalization: Track the great trading empires of the Venetians, Portuguese, and Spanish, and the “Columbian exchange,” where plants and animals from five continents were transplanted across the world.
• Coffee, tea, sugar, and slaves: Discover how the trade in a group of superfluous luxury items in the era of European colonialism altered the focus of the global economy.
• Eating in the Industrial Revolution: Learn how capital-intensive, mass food production in the Industrial Revolution forever changed human diet and nutrition.
• Big business and food imperialism: Observe the vast industrialization of food production in the late 19th and 20th centuries; its economic and human consequences; and the ideologies, movements, and practices that arose to oppose it.

A Global Richness of Culinary Cultures

At the heart of the course, you delve deeply into classic food traditions around the world. Among civilizations of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, your inquiry highlights these traditions:

• Status and ritual in ancient Rome: Learn how Roman food reflected social rank, wealth, and sophistication, and investigate the dining habits of the upwardly mobile as well as the gastronomic eccentricities of the emperor Heliogabalus.
• The exquisite flavors of medieval Islamic cuisine: In a culture with no injunction against pleasure, learn how the medieval Muslims’ sensual dishes—richly spiced, colored, or perfumed—reflected visions of a paradise on earth.
• Aztec food culture: In this unique New World tradition, discover the Aztec way of life—the indigenous foodstuffs, eating rituals, and “signature” foods, from chilies to chocolate.
• Sumptuous dining in the Renaissance: Study the sophistication and complexity of Renaissance-era food culture in the writings of Platina, Ficino, and Messisbugo, and witness the extravagance of banquets at the court of Ferrara.
• The genesis of French haute cuisine: Grasp the aesthetics of French 17th-century cookery, based in refinement and pureness of flavors and study four Gallic cookbooks that revolutionized culinary history.
• “Scientific” cooking in the 21st century: In our own diverse era, encounter the phenomenon of “molecular gastronomy”—technology-enhanced food creations designed to titillate and amaze the palate.

A Colorful and Diverse Learning Experience

Expanding on the lectures and in-studio demonstrations of food preparation techniques, the course guidebook presents a series of 39 hands-on activities—where you can learn how to make everything from Egyptian beer to Elizabethan “Chickin Pye”—that give you direct experience of how people cooked, ate, and thought about food in past eras. You also practice medieval eating rituals, track the rich evocation of food in art, and immerse yourself in the poetic ambiance of classic Japanese dining.

Across the span of the centuries you sample important food writing from many cultures, from the world’s first surviving recipes written in cuneiform to the lavish dishes of Apicius of Rome, and from the classic medieval cookbooks of Taillevent and Chiquart to the 19th-century Guide Culinaire by Escoffier.

And, throughout the series, the lectures pulsate with surprising and intriguing details of the human adventure with food:

• Dinner knives with rounded tips were developed to reduce the threat of violence at the table.
• The English word “dinner,” from the Latin disjejunare, literally means “break-fast.”
• The banana, which we know as a single fruit, actually exists in hundreds of diverse varieties.
• The world’s first restaurant-based food culture was Edo-era Japan.
• The separation of sweet and savory flavors that we know today is relatively recent historically. Before the 16th century, meat and fish were often cooked with sugar, fruit, and syrups.
• The Middle Ages produced some of history’s most outlandish and theatrical presentations of food, such as gilded boars’ heads; “invented” creatures, mixing parts of different animals; and cooked peacocks spewing flames.

Food: A Cultural Culinary History offers you an insightful and startlingly different view of our civilization that you won’t find anywhere else, revealing the development of societies and cultures through the single factor that has driven human life more than any other. In the process, you discover the stunning richness of world cultures as seen in their distinctive food traditions, and greatly broaden your own enjoyment of fine food.

36 Lectures

1Hunting, Gathering, and Stone Age Cooking

2What Early Agriculturalists Ate

3Egypt and the Gift of the Nile

4Ancient Judea—From Eden to Kosher Laws

5Classical Greece—Wine, Olive Oil, and Trade

6The Alexandrian Exchange and the Four Humors

7Ancient India—Sacred Cows and Ayurveda

8Yin and Yang of Classical Chinese Cuisine

9Dining in Republican and Imperial Rome

10Early Christianity—Food Rituals and Asceticism

11Europe’s Dark Ages and Charlemagne

12Islam—A Thousand and One Nights of Cooking

13Carnival in the High Middle Ages

14International Gothic Cuisine

15A Renaissance in the Kitchen

16Aztecs and the Roots of Mexican Cooking

171492—Globalization and Fusion Cuisines

1816th-Century Manners and Reformation Diets

19Papal Rome and the Spanish Golden Age

20The Birth of French Haute Cuisine

21Elizabethan England, Puritans, Country Food

22Dutch Treat—Coffee, Tea, Sugar, Tobacco

23African and Aboriginal Cuisines

24Edo, Japan—Samurai Dining and Zen Aesthetics

25Colonial Cookery in North America

26Eating in the Early Industrial Revolution

27Romantics, Vegetarians, Utopians

28First Restaurants, Chefs, and Gastronomy

29Big Business and the Homogenization of Food

30Food Imperialism around the World

31Immigrant Cuisines and Ethnic Restaurants

32War, Nutritionism, and the Great Depression

33World War II and the Advent of Fast Food

34Counterculture—From Hippies to Foodies

35Science of New Dishes and New Organisms

36The Past as Prologue?