The Quest for Food

1. Front Matter

   Pages I-XVIII

   PDF

2. A Nutritional Conditio Humana

   • Harald Brüssow

   Pages 1-26

3. Some Aspects of Nutritional Biochemistry

   • Harald Brüssow

   Pages 27-75

4. Bioenergetics

   • Harald Brüssow

   Pages 77-119

5. The Evolution of Eating Systems

   • Harald Brüssow

   Pages 121-417

6. The Ecology of Eating Systems

   • Harald Brüssow

   Pages 419-550

7. Eating Cultures

   • Harald Brüssow

   Pages 551-669

8. We as Food and Feeders

   • Harald Brüssow

   Pages 671-741

9. An Agro(-Eco)nomical Outlook: Feeding the Billions

   • Harald Brüssow

   Pages 743-773

10. Back Matter

    Pages 775-866

    PDF

When you go into a scientific library or look through the catalogues of scientific publishers, you will quickly find books from food scientists, food technologists, food chemists, food microbiologists, and food toxicologists. Agronomists, nut- tionists, and physicians have written on food, and last but not least cooks. What I missed was a book on food written from the perspective of a biologist. When Susan Safren, the food science editor from Springer Science + Business Media, LLC, invited me to write a book, I decided that I would write this book on food biology. What I had in mind was a survey on eating through space and time in a very fundamental way, but not in the format of a systematic textbook. The present book is more of an ordered collection of scientific essays. Contents.In Chapter 1, I start with a prehistoric Venus to explore the relationship between sex and food. Then I use another lady—Europe—to inv- tigate the strong links between food and culture. I then ask what is eating in a very basic but simple physicochemical sense. In Chapters 2 and 3, I embark on a biochemistry-oriented travel following the path of a food molecule through the central carbon pathway until it is decomposed into CO and H O and a lot 2 2 of ATP. My account does not intend to teach biochemistry, but to use recent research articles from major scientific journals to look behind food biochemistry.

• ATP
• biochemistry
• chemistry
• evolution
• food history
• food science
• microbe
• microbes
• photosynthesis

From the reviews:

"Brüssow … has written an interesting collection of scientific essays about the biological and evolutionary history of eating. The Quest for Food is organized in broad chapters with numerous subchapters. … Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty." (S. C. Hardesty, CHOICE, Vol. v4 (3), November, 2007)

• Chemin de la Chaumény 13, CH-1814 La Tour de Peilz, Switzerland

  Harald Brüssow

Harald Brüssow is a Senior Research Scientist in Nestle Research Centre's Nutrition and Health Department in Lausanne, Switzerland. He received his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry at Martinsried, Germany and served on the editorial board of two journals published by the American Society for Microbiology.

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