100 Million Years of Food

In the vein of Jared Diamond and Michael Pollan, a fascinating new exploration of what we eat and how we live, and the health consequences of denying our complicated evolutionary history with food

Finalist for the Kobo Emerging Writer Award, the Taste Canada Award and the Lane Anderson Prize

There are few areas of modern life that offer as much contradictory information and prescriptive advice as the arena of diet and health: eat a lot of meat, abstain from meat; whole-grains are healthy, whole-grains are a disaster; get a lot of sunlight, sunlight causes skin cancer; and on and on it goes.

Cutting through the confusing mass of information to present the long view of our diet and its relationship to what we eat, Stephen Le takes readers on a historic and geographic tour of how cuisine has evolved in tandem with our particular environments, and how our ancestors took advantage of the resources available to them. Travelling the world to places as far-flung as Vietnam, Kenya, Nova Scotia and Iowa, Le visits people producing food using traditional methods as well as modern techniques, and looks at how our relationship to food has strayed from centuries of tradition to the mass-produced assembly lines dependent on chemicals we see so often today.

In 100 Million Years of Food, Stephen Le argues that our ancestral diets and lifestyles are the first line of defense in protecting our health; simple prescriptions like paleo or vegan diets highjack our biology and ignore evolution, resulting in the current explosion of chronic diseases and allergies. In this remarkably clear-cut and compelling book, readers are shown not just what to eat, but how their diet is shaped from the product of millions of years of evolution.