In this work, Pere Puigdoménech reviews how the basic need to eat determines an important part of people’s lives and how, today, human beings depend on the decisions that the species made at the origin of agriculture about 10,000 years ago. Thus, society has to face the challenges of feeding a population that may exceed 9,000 million humans by the middle of this century, which is living in increasingly large cities and which has food requirements that are enough, safe, healthy and that correspond to their cultural norms.

In the 26 chapters that form the book, the author goes back to the beginning of life, where the first organisms already needed to feed, and describes the great changes that have occurred in the way of eating throughout the history of the human being. These have culminated in the development of the food industry, the food trade, precision agriculture, the exploitation of livestock and plant genetic improvement.

The book reflects on the pleasure that eating implies and the influence of culture in our diet, and also on the disappearance of some customs such as eating with the family and cooking at home, which are increasingly being replaced by fast food, ready-made foods before a screen. In addition, it describes the negative consequences that the current way of eating has on the planet and health, through climate change, food and water pollution, the increase in obesity or diseases that can derive from a high consumption of meat and little varied diets.

Highly recognised both for his merits as a researcher and for his informative role, Puigdoménech has received the Narcís Monturiol Medal for scientific and technological merit from the Catalan Government (1992), the Catalan Foundation Award for Research (2000), the COSCE Award for the Dissemination of Science (2013) and the Vicent Andrés Estellés Award for Scientific Narrative (2006).

The author is the president of the Biological Sciences Section of the Institute of Catalan Studies and is also a member of the CSIC, the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Barcelona, the European Academy, the European Organisation of Molecular Biology and is a foreign member from various European academies.