Adam Maurizio

Adam Maurizio was a Swiss botanist, specialist of food technology and cultural history, born 26 September 1862 in Kraków and died 4 March 1941 in Liebefeld near Bern.

In Autumn 1907, Maurizio was nominated professor of botany and plant technology at the High technical school of Lemberg (Lvov), where he worked until his retirement in 1923.

His intensive work on the technological aspects of cereal transformation led Maurizio to put more and more emphasis in the historical evolution of food products.

In his 1916 book "Die Getreide-Nahrung im Wandel der Zeiten", he describes what had been until then a professional domain with the point of view of cultural history and ethnography.

The fruit of many historical researches and field data was his master work, "Die Geschichte unserer Pflanzennahrung von den Urzeiten bis zur Gegenwart", published in 1927.

This is the only book translated to French in 1932, with the title Histoire de l'alimentation végétale depuis la préhistoire jusqu'à nos jours.

This first scientifically based global panorama on world food history gave Maurizio an international reputation as a historian of technology.

As one of his thoroughly documented and well written syntheses, let us note his last publication in 1939 "Die pflanzliche Ernährung in Hungerszeiten, auf Grund von eigenen Erfahrungen in Osteuropa".