Through a series of essays concerning human eating seen from the perspective of contemporary biology / medicine and recent research articles, the book explores the links between food and Man's cultural and physical evolution. Each chapter has an introduction summarizing the basic knowledge in the field, discusses the recent research results, and confirms or challenges the established concepts, which opens new aspects and leads to new questions.

Foreword.- A few glimpses of biological anthropology.- Basic concepts on eating.- The central carbon pathway.- De revolutionibus orbium metabolicorum.- Bioenergetics.- The beginning of biochemistry.- Early eaters.- Photosynthesis.- The acquisition of the atoms of life.- Nutritional interactions in the ocean: a microbial perspective.- Early steps in predation.- Increasing complexity.- Animals: enlarging the food space.- Eat or be eaten: Anatomy of the marine food chain.- Life histories between the land and the sea.- The war of the senses: the example of echolocation.- Herbivory.- Choosing food: to eat or not to eat.- A lion's share?- Going for our blood.- Going for our gut.- From gut to blood: the battle for iron.- An agro(-eco)nomical outlook: Feeding the billions.- Index.

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.