Whether she’s studying the distant Laotian delicacy of cooked rats or earning a certificate in ice cream production in Pennsylvania, for food historian and UCLA alumna Linda Civitello, cuisine is much more than just something to eat.

Beyond its edibility, food provides a fascinating tool into understanding world cultures and traditions.

Civitello’s study of the long lineage behind various culinary practices has also led to the recent March 9 release of the second edition of her popular book, “Cuisine and Culture.”

Originally published in 2003, the first edition came about after Civitello found textbooks on food history elusive.

“I was teaching a course on the history of food, and I was looking for a textbook,” she said. “So I looked for history of food in a database, expecting 30 or 40 books to come back at me, and they didn’t. I was absolutely amazed.”

Civitello then decided to take a leap and compose her own historical book on the evolution of food and culture. “Cuisine and Culture” describes how history has shaped society’s views of food and its practices, chronicling the dietary traditions of civilizations throughout time, from the ancient Romans to the American South.

Though it was a daunting task, Civitello stood well-prepared. She earned her master’s degree in history at UCLA.

She credits UCLA’s history program with providing important tools in her research for the book.

“I’m very grateful for what I learned at UCLA in one of the best history departments in the world,” Civitello said. “Part of the training is how to do research and, most especially, what kind of questions to ask.”

She also cites extensive fieldwork of sampling cuisine firsthand as a necessary preparation for her book. Living in New York for a time, Civitello was constantly exposed to more exotic food.

Civitello also discovered other cultural dishes in an even more extreme manner – literally traveling the world over to eat various foods in their native settings as a researcher for the Guinness Book of World Records’ television program.

“I went around the world several times working for the Guinness Book of World Records,” she said. “We would come up with new Guinness events, like finding an Indian village with the most snake charmers in the world. So I would research the food beforehand and then eat it when I got there. This was an absolutely invaluable experience.”

Civitello’s passion for food, however, has always been an integral aspect of her life, in which the satisfaction of savoring a good meal is of just as much importance as her more academic pursuits.

“I’m Italian. And Italians are ferocious about eating good food,” she said. “My family grew it. My grandfather had no lawn in his front yard, (but) his front and backyards were full of fruit and vegetables, sour cherry trees, mulberry trees and all kinds of different tomatoes.”

After success with the release of “Cuisine and Culture,” Civitello soon saw developments in food history greatly expand, providing her with enough new material to prompt her to publish a second edition of “Cuisine and Culture” this year.

“There was just this explosion in interest in food history,” she said. “More scholarship is coming out everywhere, especially as more things get translated into English.”

Besides including new information into the history behind food, Civitello devotes more pages to the future of food study, a future faced with further developments even after the book’s very recent release.

“Food cloning is a big issue that is in front of the state legislature in California right now. And it’s a new technology, and some people are worried about the results of this. They have questioned if the food is not as good as the original,” she said. “Issues like these are all so new and actually all come even after my book.”

Civitello explained that although there are plenty of benefits that come with technological advances in food, there can be some drawbacks also.

“It’s a little bit sad because it makes you realize that we can never know what these foods in the past tasted like because of what we have done to the soil and what we’ve done to the animals,” she said.

Civitello feels food also can reflect inherent questions ingrained in the very nature of humans, crediting much of the growing interest in food history to the age-old quest for youth.

“I think the main reason that people are really starting to become interested (in food history) is because people look to herbs and specific foods for immortality,” she said. “They really are now looking for the secret in food history.”

Amid advancements old and new, Civitello stresses the importance of admiring the ancient knowledge and tradition behind cuisine and its preparation.

She provides the example of vegetarianism, a practice that stretches all the way back to ancient Greece.

“We didn’t invent it all. People have been dealing with all these issues for a long time,” she said.