Food and the Elements examines not just the four elements of classical Western philosophy - fire, water, earth, and air - but also the elements of flavour, of chemistry, of culture, of care. In short, all the building blocks of the culinary world.

Grounded in a number of different disciplines, writers from around the globe consider the flavour of bitterness in rituals of trauma, the terror of elemental uptake, calendar change

and culinary continuity in Southern Italy, coastal foraging in Mont-Saint-Michel Bay, traditional food pairings in French Polynesia, the role of caste in late nineteenth-century colonial western Indian meat markets, the uses of lithium, salts in the Himalayas and on the Catalan coast, nixtamalization in traditional Mexican foods, synthesizing saffron and vanilla, sourness in Persian cookery, Japanese temple cuisine, feeding the Royal Navy in the Age of Fighting Sail, water and food insecurity in Uganda, edible gold, and accounts of the creation of Adam, changing dietetic patterns in medieval Islam, and the Guangzhou kitchen.