Book picks similar to
Food and Culture: A Reader by Carole Counihan
food
anthropology
non-fiction
food-studies
The United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation
David Kamp - 2006
Kamp, a writer and editor for GQ and Vanity Fair, chronicles the amazing transformation from the overcooked vegetables and scary gelatin salads of yore to the current heyday of free-range chickens, extra-virgin olive oil, Whole Foods, Starbucks, and that breed of human known as the foodie.
Cultural Resource Laws and Practice (Heritage Resource Management Series)
Thomas F. King - 1998
In this third edition of Cultural Resource Laws and Practice, Thomas F. King presents clear, practical information for those who need to navigate the labyrinth of cultural resource management (CRM). He discusses the various federal, state, and local laws governing the protection of resources, how they have been interpreted, how they operate in practice, and even how they are sometimes in contradiction with each other. He provides helpful advice on how to ensure regulatory compliance in dealing with archaeological sites, historic buildings, urban districts, sacred sites and objects, shipwrecks, and archives. King also offers careful guidance through the confusing array of federal, state, and tribal offices concerned with cultural resource management.
The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food
Adam Gopnik - 2011
An illuminating, beguiling tour of the morals and manners of our present food manias, in search of eating's deeper truths, asking "Where do we go from here?"Never before have so many North Americans cared so much about food. But much of our attention to it tends towards grim calculation (what protein is best? how much?); social preening ("I can always score the last reservation at xxxxx"); or graphic machismo ("watch me eat this now"). Gopnik shows we are not the first food fetishists but we are losing sight of a timeless truth, "the table comes first": what goes on around the table matters as much to life as what we put on the table: families come together (or break apart) over the table, conversations across the simplest or grandest board can change the world, pain and romance unfold around it—all this is more essential to our lives than the provenance of any zucchini or the road it travelled to reach us. Whatever dilemmas we may face as omnivores, how not what we eat ultimately defines our society.Gathering people and places drawn from a quarter century's reporting in North America and France, The Table Comes First marks the beginning a new conversation about the way we eat now.
The Physiology of Taste: Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin - 1825
Brillat-Savarin (1783-1833) made famous the aphorism, "Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are." He believed that food defines a nation.
Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste
Luke Barr - 2013
In the winter of that year, more or less coincidentally, the iconic culinary figures James Beard, M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, Richard Olney, Simone Beck, and Judith Jones found themselves together in the South of France. They cooked and ate, talked and argued, about the future of food in America, the meaning of taste, and the limits of snobbery. Without quite realizing it, they were shaping today’s tastes and culture, the way we eat now. The conversations among this group were chronicled by M.F.K. Fisher in journals and letters—some of which were later discovered by Luke Barr, her great-nephew. In Provence, 1970, he captures this seminal season, set against a stunning backdrop in cinematic scope—complete with gossip, drama, and contemporary relevance.
Stuffed And Starved: Markets, Power And The Hidden Battle For The World Food System
Raj Patel - 2007
It took him from the colossal supermarkets of California to India’s wrecked paddy-fields and Africa’s bankrupt coffee farms, while along the way he ate genetically engineered soy beans and dodged flying objects in the protestor-packed streets of South Korea.What he found was shocking, from the false choices given us by supermarkets to a global epidemic of farmer suicides, and real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa.Yet he also found great cause for hope—in international resistance movements working to create a more democratic, sustainable and joyful food system. Going beyond ethical consumerism, Patel explains, from seed to store to plate, the steps to regain control of the global food economy, stop the exploitation of both farmers and consumers, and rebalance global sustenance.
Joy of Cooking
Irma S. Rombauer - 1931
Rombauer self-published the first three thousand copies of Joy of Cooking in 1931, it has become the kitchen bible, with more than 20 million copies in print. This new edition of Joy has been thoroughly revised and expanded by Irma’s great-grandson John Becker and his wife, Megan Scott.John and Megan developed more than six hundred new recipes for this edition, tested and tweaked thousands of classic recipes, and updated every section of every chapter to reflect the latest ingredients and techniques available to today’s home cooks. Their strategy for revising this edition was the same one Irma and Marion employed: Vet, research, and improve Joy’s coverage of legacy recipes while introducing new dishes, modern cooking techniques, and comprehensive information on ingredients now available at farmers’ markets and grocery stores. You will find tried-and-true favorites like Banana Bread Cockaigne, Chocolate Chip Cookies, and Southern Corn Bread—all retested and faithfully improved—as well as new favorites like Chana Masala, Beef Rendang, Megan’s Seeded Olive Oil Granola, and Smoked Pork Shoulder. In addition to a thoroughly modernized vegetable chapter, there are many more vegan and vegetarian recipes, including Caramelized Tamarind Tempeh, Crispy Pan-Fried Tofu, Spicy Chickpea Soup, and Roasted Mushroom Burgers. Joy’s baking chapters now include gram weights for accuracy, along with a refreshed lineup of baked goods like Cannelés de Bordeaux, Rustic No-Knead Sourdough, Ciabatta, Chocolate-Walnut Babka, and Chicago-Style Deep-Dish Pizza, as well as gluten-free recipes for pizza dough and yeast breads. A new chapter on streamlined cooking explains how to economize time, money, and ingredients and avoid waste. You will learn how to use a diverse array of ingredients, from amaranth to za’atar. New techniques include low-temperature and sous vide cooking, fermentation, and cooking with both traditional and electric pressure cookers. Barbecuing, smoking, and other outdoor cooking methods are covered in even greater detail. This new edition of Joy is the perfect combination of classic recipes, new dishes, and indispensable reference information for today’s home cooks. Whether it is the only cookbook on your shelf or one of many, Joy is and has been the essential and trusted guide for home cooks for almost a century. This new edition continues that legacy.
Best Food Writing 2007
Holly Hughes - 2000
With eight sections ranging from Food Fights to Fast Food, The World's Kitchen to Why I Cook, this stellar collection features both established food writers and rising stars who serve up their culinary forays, musings, and discoveries. By turns luminous, nostalgic, witty, sensual, and sometimes just plain funny, this delectable sampler will invoke your imagination and tantalize your taste buds-whether you're in the mood for tartare-or tacos.Food fights --Waiting for asparagus / by Barbara Kingsolver --Local heroes? / by Barry Estabrook --Rare tuna / by Todd Kliman --French revolution / by Violaine Charest-Sigouin --Do recipes make you a better cook? / by Daniel Patterson --You may kiss the chef's napkin ring / by Frank Bruni --Discovering new worlds / by Francis Lam --Feast of burden / by Sara Deseran --Organicize me / by Michael A. Stusser --Home cooking --Kitchen existential / by David Leite --Cast iron skillet / by Andrea King Collier --Death by lobster pad Thai / by Steve Almond --Alabama's best covered-dish dinner / by John T. Edge --The age of casseroles / by Irene Sax --Someone's in the kitchen --The great carrot caper / by Dan Barber --Spoon-fed / by John Grossmann --The Harveys circus / by Marco Pierre White and James Steen --The best chef in the world / by Alan Richman --Building the perfect pizza / by Laurie Winer --Sharing in the feast with Johnny Apple / by Adam Noagourney --Dining around --My Miami / by Anthony Bourdain --Then there were none / by Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl --Precision cuisine : the art of feeding 800 a night in style / by Melissa Clark --The greatest restaurant on earth / by Ivy Knight --Are you lonesome tonight? / by Gail Shepherd --Mood food / by Tim Gihring --Wedded bliss / by Jason Sheehan --Post-it love / by Brett Anderson --Fast food --Don't call it a hot dog / by Joe Yonan --In search of the transcendent taqueria / by Bill Addison --Porno burrito / by Jonathan Gold --Las fabulosas taco trucks / by Robb Walsh --The world's kitchen --The soulful crêpes of Brittany / by Nancy Coons --Shanghai high / by Adam Sachs --Old school Madrid / by Anya Von Bremzen --Visiting the old city / by Madhur Jaffrey --Waiting for a cappuccino / by Carolyn Thériault --The Japanese paradigm / by John Kessler --The insidious rise of cosmo-cuisine / by Salma Abdelnour --The meat of the matter --Meat / by James Sturz --What's a stake at the butcher shop / by Pete Wells --The best burger / by Raymond Sokolov --Steak, well done / by Colman Andrews --Personal tastes --A memorable fruit / by Shuna Fish Lydon --A sugar binge / by Charles Ferruzza --The centerpiece / by Rita Williams --A grandchild of Italy cracks the spaghetti code / by Kim Severson --Why I cook --The frying of latke 49 / by Steven Shaw --Around the world to our kitchen table / by Ame Gilbert --Give me credit / by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall --Cooking for a crowd / by Matthew Amster-Burton --Simple cooking, then and now / by John Thorne
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo
Mary Douglas - 1966
Professor Douglas makes points which illuminate matters in the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science and help to show the rest of us just why and how anthropology has become a fundamentally intellectual discipline.
Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food
Wendell Berry - 2009
Long before Whole Foods organic produce was available at your local supermarket, Berry was farming with the purity of food in mind. For the last five decades, Berry has embodied mindful eating through his land practices and his writing. In recognition of that influence, Michael Pollan here offers an introduction to this wonderful collection.Drawn from over thirty years of work, this collection joins bestsellers The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Pollan, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver, as essential reading for anyone who cares about what they eat. The essays address such concerns as: How does organic measure up against locally grown? What are the differences between small and large farms, and how does that affect what you put on your dinner table? What can you do to support sustainable agriculture?A progenitor of the Slow Food movement, Wendell Berry reminds us all to take the time to understand the basics of what we ingest. “Eating is an agriculture act,” he writes. Indeed, we are all players in the food economy.
Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History
Heinrich Eduard Jacob - 1943
Bread's role in politics, religion, technology, and beyond.
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking
Samin Nosrat - 2017
Chef and writer Samin Nosrat has taught everyone from professional chefs to middle school kids to author Michael Pollan to cook using her revolutionary, yet simple, philosophy. Master the use of just four elements—Salt, which enhances flavor; Fat, which delivers flavor and generates texture; Acid, which balances flavor; and Heat, which ultimately determines the texture of food—and anything you cook will be delicious. By explaining the hows and whys of good cooking, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will teach and inspire a new generation of cooks how to confidently make better decisions in the kitchen and cook delicious meals with any ingredients, anywhere, at any time. Echoing Samin’s own journey from culinary novice to award-winning chef, Salt, Fat Acid, Heat immediately bridges the gap between home and professional kitchens. With charming narrative, illustrated walkthroughs, and a lighthearted approach to kitchen science, Samin demystifies the four elements of good cooking for everyone. Refer to the canon of 100 essential recipes—and dozens of variations—to put the lessons into practice and make bright, balanced vinaigrettes, perfectly caramelized roast vegetables, tender braised meats, and light, flaky pastry doughs. Featuring 150 illustrations and infographics that reveal an atlas to the world of flavor by renowned illustrator Wendy MacNaughton, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat will be your compass in the kitchen. Destined to be a classic, it just might be the last cookbook you’ll ever need. With a foreword by Michael Pollan.
America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA - the Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts That Define Real American Food
Pat Willard - 2008
With the unpublished WPA manuscript as her guide, Willard visits the sites of American food’s past glory to rediscover the vibrant foundation of America’s traditional cuisine. She visits a booyah cook-off in Minnesota, a political feast in Mississippi, a watermelon festival in Oklahoma, and a sheepherders ball in Idaho, to name a few. Featuring recipes and never-before-seen photos, including those from the WPA by Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and Marion Post Wolcott, America Eats! is a glowing celebration of American food, past and present.
The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South
John T. Edge - 2017
Beginning with the pivotal role of cooks in the Civil Rights movement, noted authority John T. Edge narrates the South's journey from racist backwater to a hotbed of American immigration. In so doing, he traces how the food of the poorest Southerners has become the signature trend of modern American haute cuisine. This is a people's history of the modern South told through the lens of food.Food was a battleground in the Civil Rights movement. Access to food and ownership of culinary tradition was a central part of the long march to racial equality. THE POTLIKKER PAPERS begins in 1955 as black cooks and maids fed and supported the Montgomery Bus Boycott and it concludes in 2015 as a Newer South came to be, enriched by the arrival of immigrants from Lebanon to Vietnam to all points in between.Along the way, THE POTLIKKER PAPERS tracks many different evolutions of Southern identity --first in the 1970s, from the back-to-the-land movement that began in the Tennessee hills to the rise of fast and convenience foods modeled on Southern staples. Edge narrates the gentrification that gained traction in North Carolina and Louisiana restaurants of the 1980s and the artisanal renaissance that reconnected farmers and cooks in the 1990s and in the 00s. He profiles some of the most extraordinary and fascinating figures in Southern food, including Fannie Lou Hamer, Colonel Sanders, Edna Lewis, Paul Prudhomme, Craig Claiborne, Sean Brock, and many others.Like many great provincial dishes around the world, potlikker is a salvage food. During the antebellum era, masters ate the greens from the pot and set aside the left-over potlikker broth for their slaves, unaware that the broth, not the greens, was nutrient-rich. After slavery, potlikker sustained the working poor, black and white. In the rapidly gentrifying South of today, potlikker has taken on new meanings as chefs have reclaimed the dish.Over the last two generations, wrenching changes have transformed the South. THE POTLIKKER PAPERS tells the story of that change--and reveals how Southern food has become a shared culinary language for the nation.Music Copyright (c) 2012, Lee Bains III
Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India
Colleen Taylor Sen - 2014
Its cuisine differs from north to south, yet what is it that makes Indian food recognizably Indian, and how did it get that way? To answer those questions, Colleen Taylor Sen examines the diet of the Indian subcontinent for thousands of years, describing the country’s cuisine in the context of its religious, moral, social, and philosophical development. Exploring the ancient indigenous plants such as lentils, eggplants, and peppers that are central to the Indian diet, Sen depicts the country’s agricultural bounty and the fascination it has long held for foreign visitors. She illuminates how India’s place at the center of a vast network of land and sea trade routes led it to become a conduit for plants, dishes, and cooking techniques to and from the rest of the world. She shows the influence of the British and Portuguese during the colonial period, and she addresses India’s dietary prescriptions and proscriptions, the origins of vegetarianism, its culinary borrowings and innovations, and the links between diet, health, and medicine. She also offers a taste of Indian cooking itself—especially its use of spices, from chili pepper, cardamom, and cumin to turmeric, ginger, and coriander—and outlines how the country’s cuisine varies throughout its many regions. Lavishly illustrated with one hundred images, Feasts and Fasts is a mouthwatering tour of Indian food full of fascinating anecdotes and delicious recipes that will have readers devouring its pages.