The Oxford Companion to Food
Alan Davidson

The Oxford Companion to Food is a gloriously erudite and wonderfully distracting encyclopedia of the biology, history, and culture of food. Specialists provide some of the entries, but Alan Davidson has written the large majority himself, which helps to give the work a unified feel. The Companion is obviously useful as a reference, but it is also a pleasure to browse — I've read perhaps a third of it so far, mostly in undirected browsing.

The larger number of entries are on basic foodstuffs and the plants and animals from which they are derived. Into this category also fall most of the forty "feature" articles, on topics such as "pig", "garlic", "sugar", and — the longest entry, at six pages! — "chocolate". Here is the historical discussion from the three pages on "coconut":

To Feed a Nation: A history of Australian food science and technology
Keith Farrer

To Feed a Nation is broad-ranging, covering not just food science and technology but their underpinnings and connections: where relevant it touches on agriculture and husbandry, transport and distribution networks, finance and capital, medicine and public health, and the broader history of science. Part one briefly surveys Aboriginal food, the skills and knowledge accumulated in Britain over centuries and brought to Australia by the First Fleet, and the village technologies of early Sydney.

Part two covers the developments in food technology during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with chapters on meat processing, refrigeration, sugar, fruit and vegetable products, milling and flour-based products, fermentation (beer and wines), dairy products. It also covers early moves towards a scientific approach.