work could be, beyond replacing human labour with machines, and beyond shortening working hours so as to leave time for leisure and entertainment, began in the 1990s in a research project for the European Commission. His starting point was that since most existing jobs and professions were invented long ago, their purpose was to fulfil hopes which were different from those of the present generation, for whom survival, status and skill are insufficient rewards. He sees a billion young people, over the next few decades, searching not just for jobs, but for more interesting and exciting jobs, and being increasingly demanding as they become more educated and their curiosities range more widely. Because agriculture, industry and the service sectors are governed by the doctrine that reducing staff is the key to efficiency, and because work is no longer an integral part of family, community or spiritual life, as it once was, the young are being challenged to invent new occupations, providing more satisfactions than existing forms. Zeldin and his colleagues have been making portraits of people at work in many different sectors and at many different levels, to discover the divergences between what employers offer and what employees want or could want if they knew it was possible. This has been followed by trials to test how supermarkets, offices, factories and hotels can expand their priorities so that beyond the commercial transactions on which they concentrate, they can become proactive disseminators of culture and education to both employees and customers, and more inspired stimulants of talent and imagination. Zeldin is also evolving a new set of ambitions for business schools and new academic answers to the increasingly narrow specialisation that both work and education impose. Gastronomy After writing a 17,000 word chapter on ‘Eating and Drinking’ in the History of French Passions, Zeldin persuaded his colleagues at St Antony's College Oxford (who acquiesced with sceptical smiles) to appoint a research fellow in the history of gastronomy. The person chosen was a former ambassador, Alan Davidson, who had given up diplomacy to study food, on which he had published remarkable books. Zeldin was determined that gastronomy was as worthy of study in universities as any other of the pleasures of life. Together they founded the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in 1981, which has met annually ever since, bringing together about 200 experts, professional and amateur, from all over the