Massimo Montanari (b. 1949) is a medievalist historian, a specialist in the history of food, a teacher at the University of Bologna and the unique University of Gastronomic Sciences, in his book he traces the evolution of food traditions in Europe from the 3rd to the 20th centuries. From the bread and olive oil of the ancient Romans and Greeks, a piece of meat on a barbarian's fire, to modern canned food and fast food; from the cult of food in myth and epic, from the thousand-year-old fear of hunger to the modern fear of overeating... The history of nutrition, insists M. Montanari, is as much an integral part of the history of civilization as political or cultural history. By getting to know what and how the ancestors of modern Europeans ate, the reader will see how the evolution of gastronomy reflected the path traveled by European society over seventeen centuries, and will also be able to take a fresh look at their own gastronomic habits.