Each volume contains more than 1,000 pages of information. Together they cover everything that is known about food and nutrition since human life began.
Topics range from the diet of pre-historic man to vegetarianism to the politics of food.
There's also a food-plant dictionary. A 40-member international board of experts in food and nutrition helped the editors to identify some 200 writers from more than a dozen countries to who contributed the various entries. As part of their research, the editors also traveled to food markets around the world and sampled some of the many foods described in the book. Fluent in German and Spanish, she gets the credit for translating writers' submissions into English and editing their copy for a consistent writing style. In the end, it became a labor of love for her and her husband.