For the Curious — Further Reading

For the Curious — Further Reading

A starting shelf, primary sources first; every title below is drawn on somewhere in this volume.

• Charles Darwin, Journal of Researches (1839; second edition 1845), long better known as The Voyage of the Beagle — the naturalist's own record, and the primary source for his opportunistic table.
• Adrian Desmond & James Moore, Darwin (1991) — the standard modern biography, and the Glutton Club set in its proper Cambridge context.
• Frank Buckland, Curiosities of Natural History (four series, 1857–72) — the zoophagist's own delighted voice; the Victorian appetite for the whole animal kingdom, told from the inside.
• Christopher Lever, They Dined on Eland: The Story of the Acclimatisation Societies (1992) — the standard modern history of the movement that tried to eat the empire onto English pasture, and of the ecological reckoning it set in train.
• Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago (1869) — the co-discoverer of natural selection, and the source of the most-quoted verdict ever passed on the durian.
• Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966) — the anthropology of dirt, taboo and "matter out of place"; the intellectual backbone of Chapter Five.
• Paul Rozin & April E. Fallon, "A Perspective on Disgust," Psychological Review 94 (1987) — the foundational paper treating disgust as, first of all, a food emotion.
• Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World (1922) — the greatest of all polar memoirs; the source of this chapter's epigraph, and of its hoosh.
• Robert Falcon Scott, Scott's Last Expedition (the Journals, 1913) — the primary record of the Terra Nova expedition, and the verbatim source of the Midwinter Day dinner of 22 June 1911.
• Ernest Shackleton, South (1919) — the leader's own narrative of the Endurance and the open-boat voyage of the James Caird; the primary source for the barest bill of fare in Chapter Seven.
• Owen Beattie & John Geiger, Frozen in Time: The Fate of the Franklin Expedition (1987) — the forensic investigation that put lead poisoning at the centre of the Franklin mystery; to be read now alongside the later work that has qualified it.
• Vilhjalmur Stefansson, The Fat of the Land (1956; an enlarged edition of Not by Bread Alone, 1946) — the great, contrarian, largely-right and partly-wrong argument for pemmican and the all-meat diet.
• Jason C. Anthony, Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine (2012) — a modern history of what the heroic age actually ate, rigorous and wry; the best single book on the polar table.
• Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security (2013) — the authoritative survey of entomophagy, and the source of Chapter Four's figures.
• Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking (1984; revised 2004) — the modern standard on the chemistry of the kitchen, indispensable for the ferments, the fats and the amines.