Q. I need to find information about the history of some types of food

This sounds like a familiar assignment, our general advice is to search for background information on whatever type(s) of food you have chosen. Let's say you want to know about the history or [your food here]. We have databases by three different encyclopedia publishers that will be relevant for searches like this: Gale Virtual Reference Library, Oxford Reference Online, and Sage Knowledge eBooks. Here's the process I follow when I'm using these:

• search [your food here]
• look at the names of the encyclopedias that are listed in the results
• If I were looking for hamburger, for example, I would look for something like the Encyclopedia of Food and Culture 
  • If I saw an entry from something like Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War I would not choose that one, since it will likely focus on Hamburger Hill (a battle) rather than food
• When I find something that looks useful, I usually
  • Download (and save somewhere I can find it) the article
  • Get the correct citation (and save it in a place I can find it)
  • There are buttons to do this in the top navigation header

Thanks for asking!