We began work on the Cambridge History and Culture of Food and Nutrition Project even as we were still reading the page proofs for The Cambridge World History of Human Disease, published in 1993. At some point in that effort we had begun to conceive of continuing our history of human health by moving into food and nutrition – an area that did more than simply focus on the breakdown of that health. For the history of disease we had something of a model provided by August Hirsch in his three-volume Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology (London, 1883–6). Yet there was no “Handbook of Geographical and Historical Food and Nutrition” to light the way for the present volumes, and thus they would be unique.

Fortunately, there was no lack of expertise available; it came from some 200 authors and board members, representing a score of disciplines ranging from agronomy to zoology. This undertaking, then, like its predecessor, represents a collective interdisciplinary and international effort, aimed in this case at encapsulating what is known of the history of food and nutrition throughout humankind’s stay on the planet. We hope that, together, these volumes on nutrition and the earlier one on disease will provide scholars of the future – as well as those of the present – a glimpse of what is known (and not known) about human health as the twentieth century comes to a close.

Two of our major themes are embedded in the title. Food, of course, is central to history; without it, there would be no life and thus no history, and we devote considerable space to providing a history of the most important foodstuffs across the globe. To some extent, these treatments are quantitative, whereas by contrast, Nutrition – the body’s need for foods and the uses it makes of them – has had much to do with shaping the quality of human life. Accordingly, we have placed a considerable array of nutritional topics in longitudinal contexts to illustrate their importance to our past and present and to suggest something of our nutritional future.