Eat: The Story of Food

Christopher Columbus. Julia Child. Clarence Birdseye. These are some of the revolutionary men and women who have changed what and how we eat, remaking not just food history but human history. Some of these food revolutionaries are well known, others obscure. But one thing they have in common is that they have fundamentally shaped how we live today.

The history of meat: it's what made us us. It grew our brains, shrank our guts. It made us hunters. It made us killers. It forged our families. And hamburgers allowed us to dream. From roasting woolly mammoth steaks over a bonfire to stalking Chateaubriand on Wall Street, the story of meat is the story of mankind.

Throughout history, mankind has been on a mad-dash to satisfy our prodigious sweet tooth and consume vital energy. Along the way sugar helped build empires and even fueled the Industrial Revolution. With sugary sodas and processed desserts, man chases a bliss point in life.

We look "off the eaten path" investigating ways to catch, eat and prepare "what the sea gives us" instead of creating unsustainable demands for a single species. Newly developed techniques of 3-D ocean farming of oysters, mussels and sea kelp not only sustain us but heal the oceans as well. Kelp! It's what's for dinner.

In the 20th century, what we eat changed so our great grandparents would hardly recognize it. Today we spend less of our time on food than ever before. How did this happen and what does it mean? Guilty Pleasures explores modern food's uneasy relationship between convenience and quality.

Today, civilization takes grains for granted - and in this hour, we'll explain why that might be a somewhat shortsighted approach! Bread, beer, pasta, pizza, noodles and rice make the world go 'round - and every culture has some kind of variation on these culinary themes.