Food and Cultural Studies
Author: Bob Ashley
What and how we eat are two of the most persistent choices we face in everyday life. Whatever we decide on though, and however mundane our decisions may seem, they will be inscribed with information both about ourselves and about our positions in the world around us. Yet, food has only recently become a significant and coherent area of inquiry for cultural studies and the social sciences.
Food and Cultural Studies re-examines the interdisciplinary history of food studies from a cultural studies framework, from the semiotics of Barthes and the anthropology of Levi-Strauss to Elias' historical analysis and Bourdieu's work on the relationship between food, consumption and cultural identity. The authors then go on to explore subjects as diverse as food and nation, the gendering of eating in, the phenomenon of TV chefs, the ethics of vegetarianism and food, risk and moral panics.
This book is fascinating reading for students and academics studying both consumption and cultural studies morebroadly.
Read also In Search of National Economic Success or Managing with the Wisdom of Love
Cooking in America, 1840-1945
Author: Alice L McLean
This cookbook covers the years 1840 through 1945, a time during which American cookery underwent a full-scale revolution. Gas and electric stoves replaced hearth cookery. Milk products came from commercial dairy farms rather than the family cow. Daily meals were no longer bound by seasons and regions, as canned, bottled, and eventually frozen products flooded the market and trains began to transport produce and meat from one end of the country to the other. During two World Wars and the Great Depression women entered the work force in unprecedented numbers and household servants abandoned low-paying domestic jobs to work in factories. As a result of these monumental changes, American home cooking became irrevocably simplified and cookery skills geared more toward juggling time to comb grocery store shelves for the best and most economical products than toward butchering and preserving an entire animal carcass or pickling fruits and vegetables.
Pauline Baughman - Library Journal
In this fascinating book, McLean (honors postdoctoral fellow at Sweet Briar Coll.) examines cookbooks as a primary source, showing the enormous changes that occurred on the tables of Americans from the preindustrial period to the onset of World War II. Divided into three chronological sections, the book kicks off with a brief overview of the cooking and preservation methods, major foodstuffs, cooking equipment, cultural influences, and dining customs of the time. The first section includes recipes from three early American cookbooks; the second section demonstrates the rise in popularity of community cookbooks and includes recipes from the first known cookbooks written by an African American and a Hispanic; and the third section shows the rise of male-authored cookbooks and reflects the changes in cooking habits as a result of two world wars and the Great Depression. Each section also includes popular recipes—over 300 in all—taken from cookbooks of the time, ladies' magazines, newspapers, and family collections.
Marilyn FairbanksCopyright 2006 Reed Business Information. - School Library Journal
Gr 9 Up
These well-organized titles provide historical overviews, discussing changes in recipes brought about by changes in ways of life, e.g., agrarian to industrialized economy, the Depression, and limitation of ingredients due to wars. Both books include commentary and recipes. However, neither book states amounts of ingredients, the exception being the third chapter in America, but, even then, not all of the recipes include measurements. Many of the recipes make large batches of a particular dish without stating the number of servings. Text boxes range from "14th-Century Advice to a Young Bride" (Europe ) to "To Dress a Chicken" (America ), and glossaries explain terms not commonly in use today. The black-and-white illustrations of equipment and foods are excellent. Back matter includes extensive bibliographies of cookbooks and good indexes. The series foreword states that the recipes are meant to appeal to "novice" cooks. However, only very experienced or adventurous cooks would try to re-create these dishes.
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