Discriminating taste

Sample

Naomichi Ishige

"Despite the popularity of Japanese food in the West today, remarkably little is known about its history. This is a detailed study of the food and dietary practices of the Japanese from the Palaeolithic era, before rice was cultivated, through the period when the distinctive Japanese culinary tradition reached its culmination (between 1640 and 1860), and on to the present day. This evolution is traced for typical dishes of all periods, condiments, beverages, ingredients, methods of preparation, etiquette, the aesthetics of presentation, eating implements and cooking utensils in the social, political, and economic contexts of their consumption and use. Topics include the spread of soy sauce, the design of Japanese food, introducing the reader to home cookery and regional schools of cuisine that are virtually unknown outside Japan. It makes a unique contribution to the study of Japanese culture, and of culinary history as a whole."--Jacket.

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Sidney Saylor Farr

Sydney Saylor Farr is a woman who knows Appalachia well. Born on Stoney Fork in southeastern Kentucky, she has lived much of her life close to the mountains, among people whose roots are deep in the soil and who pass on to their children a love for the land, a strong sense of belonging and of place. Mountain food and how it is cooked is very much a part of this sense of place. Ask any displaced Appalachians what they miss most and they will probably talk about soup beans, country ham, and homemade buscuits. They may also remember the kitchens at home, the warmth from the wood-burning stove.

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Psyche Williams Forson, Carole Counihan

"The field of food studies has been growing rapidly over the last thirty years and has exploded since the turn of the century. Scholars from an array of disciplines have trained fresh theoretical and methodological approaches onto new dimensions of the human relationship to food. This anthology capitalizes on this particular cultural moment to bring to the fore recent scholarship from some new and established voices and that have been pushing the limits of the field into ever more fascinating and innovative directions. Taking Food Public is organized into five interrelated sections: food production, consumption, performance, diasporas, and activism. The articles in this reader aim to provide new perspectives on the changing meanings and uses of food in the twenty-first century.This book integrates understandings of race, class, gender, region, sexuality and ethnic/national identity into the human experience of food. Taking Food Public also examines how this experience is manifested in extraordinary forms of food production and consumption (in mass media performances of cooking and eating, redefinitions of foodways throughout Diasporas, identities around food, and in food activism).Most important, this bewildering array of new academic insights into food and culture as well as the wealth of new food trends and food issues around the world cries out for original ways to frame, organize, and help teach these new developments. Here are the right Editors to help write original, teachable, foundational essays and otherwise organize this disparate, exciting new material into a coherent whole"--

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Alice Morse Earle in the year

The author reconstructs for us colonial life by describing in great detail manners, customs, dress, homes, and child life.