The Cambridge History and Culture of Food and Nutrition Project will be published by Cambridge University Press as The Cambridge World History of Human Nutrition in 3 volumes. It is the first effort ever to elaborate a global survey of nutrition from that of hunter-gatherers, through the origins of agriculture and animal husbandry, to policy related issues of the past, present, and future. As a consequence the project is, of necessity, a major inter-disciplinary effort involving some 180 scholars from numerous field including anthropology, archeology, agronomy, biology, geography, history, medicine, nutrition, and zoology. In addition, it is an international effort. Fully 50 of its authors represent 20 countries and numerous universities outside of the United States. Finally, the project undertakes in tandem with its predecessor, now published as The Cambridge World History of Human Disease, to summarize much of what is known about human health at the end of the twentieth century for future scholars. In the present, it should be of considerable assistance to those who are concerned with the political, economic, social, and demographic past of the various portions of the globe and wish to add a biological dimension to their research. Certainly vital to that research is what various peoples ate and did not eat. Nutritional status is one of the most important variables in the general outlook of a people, their decisions on marriage and childbearing -- in fact, in almost every aspect of their demographic experience. But it is also the case that many of the complexities of nutrition, nutritional chemistry, and deficiency diseases can be daunting for the nonspecialist. The proposed project should remedy this. It is aimed at a broad, interdisciplinary group of social scientists, and humanists who lack this expertise, although it will also contain much of interest and importance for specialists, and policy-makers whose focus is on food and nutrition in both the developed and developing world.
