Begun in 1976, published in 1999, 'there were to be no recipes, and there are none', instead, an egalitarian encyclopedia that stops a moment before genetically modified foods; organised alphabetically: aardvark ('truly one of a kind, it has no relations') to zucchini ('only became prominent in the twentieth century'), and illustrated by Soun Vannithone; 865pp. plus bibliography and index.
