The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past

These monocrops have allowed the human population to increase to 8 billion, while leaving over 800 million of us chronically undernourished. For a long time, food historians have been aware that the ancient world had a mysterious secret sauce known as garum. It appears in almost every recipe in Apicius, the biggest compendium of recipes that survives from Roman times. In Spain, I met with a team of food scientists and archaeologists who used gas chromatography and electron scanning microscopes to analyze residue within amphora recovered from the eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79.

‘Bugs the food of the future,’ says author Taras Grescoe

After the First World War, Italians were disgusted with the ruling class, the Liberals who had controlled political life since the unification of the nation in the nineteenth-century. They saw Liberal politicians as ineffectual and TarasGresCoE.com out-of-touch, and rightly blamed them for drawing them into a ruinous war. I tend to think of myself as a writer who travels, rather than a travel writer. I’m fascinated by capturing and evoking a sense of place in my writing, and have a penchant for falling in love with places—cities in particular—and trying to bring them to life for readers.

There’s More to Fort McMurray than Oil

• Taras is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Guardian, and National Geographic Traveler.
• Then there’s the green revolution, which really kicked things into overdrive starting in the 1960s, where you’re bringing the power of fossil fuels along with fertilizers, along with new breeds of wheat that can feed the millions and the billions.
• Since the publication of Straphanger, he has published op-eds, given keynotes, and developed a social media following commenting on urbanism, transit, and active transport.
• Making garum was a way of discovering how unfamiliar—but also how delicious—ancient cooking really was.

The city the German and British Romantics loved in the nineteenth century was a beautiful backwater, where sheep grazed among the ruins of the Forum. The Liberals made Rome a capital again, but in spite of their attempts to modernize—bringing in streetlights, sanitation, taking measures to limit the damage brought on by the flooding of the Tiber—it remained backwards compared to London, Berlin, and Paris. Mussolini and the Fascists focused on building new roads and triumphal routes, and “liberating” the imperial monuments they approved of, often at the expense of poor residents who were relocated from their demolished homes to makeshift hovels far from the centre of the city. It tells the story of Lauro de Bosis, an Italian-American poet and aviator, who defied Mussolini’s politics – in the air.

He is also a contributor to an assortment of publications, including the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic Traveler, and The Wall Street Journal. Taras Grescoe (born 1966)1 is a Canadian non-fiction writer. His debut book, Sacré Blues, won the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction, Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction, and McAuslan First Book Prize. His fourth book, Bottomfeeder, won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, awarded to the best work of non-fiction by a Canadian writer, in 2008, as well as the IACP Award for Literary Food Writing. In the half dozen times I’ve been to Italy in the last decade, I’ve definitely seen a rise in xeno-phobic, and sometimes even Fascist, rhetoric. CasaPound, Salvini, the Lega Nord—their suspi-cion of outsiders, glorification of the Patria, and not-so-subtle nods of approval to violence and thuggery would have been more than familiar to Italians who lived a century ago.

Since the publication of Straphanger, he has published op-eds, given keynotes, and developed a social media following commenting on urbanism, transit, and active transport. Since 2023, he has written a regular newsletter for the Quebec newsmagazine L’actualité on trains, transit, urbanism, and sustainable transportation. I wrote “Possess the Air” to remind people that, at a time when ignorance and brutality were on the rise, people of conscience like Lauro de Bosis found the courage to put their lives on the line to denounce the evil. The past, as the scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder has written, doesn’t repeat, but it does instruct—and we’ve got a lot to learn from what happened in Italy a hundred years ago.

The best hope for important species is to find their wild relatives, plant them, cultivate them—and eat them. When it comes to food, the secret to time travel is that humans alive today are identical in physique, intelligence, and problem-solving abilities to just about anybody who has lived in the last sixty thousand years. When confronted with a problem—like how to build shelter or assemble a meal—our ancestors drew on the same set of innate capacities that we possess today. Once you know that, the only things you need to go into the past are curiosity and imagination. Visit Author Central to update your books, profile picture, and biography.

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, 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.