Empires of Food:  Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations.
Published in 2010 by The Free Press (a division of Simon and Schuster)

One of 2010's top books according to the Financial Times.

Listed by the Atlantic Monthly as a top food book from 2010

"Forget the old stages of human history, the familiar stone, bronze, iron age sequence: University of Guelph geographer Fraser and journalist co-author Rimas make a convincing case that food—or rather, food surpluses—best explain the rise and fall of civilizations."
— Mcleans' Magazine

"In this new book by professor Evan Fraser and American journalist Andrew Rimas, it is revealed, in a compelling narrative, just how precarious our global food systems were, are and will be. It is a dense and intensive read, but the pair’s flair for scene-setting rhetoric and well-timed wit lifts it from the drier tones of academia."
— Timeout London.

"A racy, swashbuckling journey through the boom and bust of “food empires”, the elaborate systems of storing, transporting and exchanging food that underpin all civilisations. The writing is entertaining but the message is grim: we are feeding ourselves on a transient glut of fossil fuels and good weather, and a violent contraction in global food supplies looms."
— Financial Times

"In a breathtakingly vivid account of the history of food trade and its production and consumption, Evan Fraser and Andrew Rimas offer a series of metaphors to illustrate the dilemmas facing our contemporary global food supply."
— Times Higher Education Supplement

Publisher’s description: 
A sweeping history of how food determines the fate of human societies, this Guns, Germs, and Steel of food is particularly urgent in a time of global food crisis.

The history of the food trade is like a sequence of waves, peaking with the height of empires, then sloughing down into dark ages marked by deforestation, famine, and warfare. It happened at the end of the Roman Empire, when slave plantations overworked Europe’s and Egypt’s soil and drained its vigor. It happened in the fourteenth century, when medieval civilization crashed into famine and plague. It happened again in the nineteenth century, when catastrophic colonial agricultural schemes plunged half of the world into a poverty from which it has never recovered. Today, even though we live in an age of astounding agricultural productivity, we are feeling the first lurch of another slide. Empires of Food offers prescription as well as exposition, arguing that neither Local Food movements nor Free Market Economists will stave off the next crash.

In vivid stories and with a broad historical perspective, Empires of Food tells how food has determined the fate of human societies for the past 12,000 years—and how the chips will fall in years to come.

Available at Amazon.ca