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Hello, the French philosopher of food Brier Savar wrote in his physiology of taste

The pleasures of the table belong to all times and all ages to every country and to every day

They go hand-in-hand with all our other pleasures

Outlast them and remain to console us for their loss

The story of food is cultural as well as culinary and what we eat and how we eat has always been linked to who we are and who we might become

From the great humanist think a irasmus warning us to always use a fork to the materialist philosopher Foyerbach telling us boldly

You are what you eat

But what have we eaten and why in Europe since the Renaissance however intellectual appetites fed our empty stomachs

We need to explore the history food in modern Europe is Rebecca Spang lecturer in modern history at University College London and author of

The invention of the restaurant Ivan Day food historian and author of eat drink and be merry the British at table from

1600 to 2000 and the historian Philippe Fernandez Amesto

Professor of history and geography at Queen Mary University of London and author of a new book food a history

Philippe you're right in your new book the movement known as the Renaissance

Transformed courtly cookery as it transformed other arts. Can you give us some idea of what that transformation was?

Yeah, sure although I'm a bit reluctant to do that because I

Look across the table you melvin and I see an intellectual and say you naturally think the Renaissance is terribly important and actually

500 years get the most important thing that was going on in the history of food and he probably in the history of the world

It was the last ecological exchange which saw foodstuffs being transplanted from one continent to the other for the first time in history

United since Pangea was shattered and the continents were

Sundered and that was huge in a human intervention evolution which

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