The individual chapters bring the reader on a journey from prehistory and the Ice Ages in Ireland through to the arrival of fisher-gatherers, early farmers, the introduction of livestock, cultivation of crops and development of cooking technologies, to the setting up of schools of poetry, medicine, and music in the early Medieval period. Personal correspondences, diaries, literature, and linguistic analysis assist in charting the rise in the social and nutritional importance of the potato from its arrival in the sixteenth century to the ensuing calamity, the Great Famine of 1845–52. Late-nineteenth century technological changes modernised food production and society at large, and from the early decades of the twentieth century Ireland adopted this modernity in all its nuanced facets, from the proliferation of restaurants, hotels, tourism, to rural electrification, televisions and the rise in consumerism and globalisation
