Product Description

Elegantly written by a distinguished culinary historian, Food Is Culture explores the innovative premise that everything having to do with food& mdash;its capture, cultivation, preparation, and consumption& mdash;represents a cultural act. Even the "choices" made by primitive hunters and gatherers were determined by a culture of economics (availability) and medicine (digestibility and nutrition) that led to the development of specific social structures and traditions.Massimo Montanari begins with the "invention" of cooking which allowed humans to transform natural, edible objects into cuisine. Cooking led to the creation of the kitchen, the adaptation of raw materials into utensils, and the birth of written and oral guidelines to formalize cooking techniques like roasting, broiling, and frying. The transmission of recipes allowed food to acquire its own language and grow into a complex cultural product shaped by climate, geography, the pursuit of pleasure, and later, the desire for health.In his history, Montanari touches on the spice trade, the first agrarian societies, Renaissance dishes that synthesized different tastes, and the analytical attitude of the Enlightenment, which insisted on the separation of flavors. Brilliantly researched and analyzed, he shows how food, once a practical necessity, evolved into an indicator of social standing and religious and political identity. Whether he is musing on the origins of the fork, the symbolic power of meat, cultural attitudes toward hot and cold foods, the connection between cuisine and class, the symbolic significance of certain foods, or the economical consequences of religious holidays, Montanari's concise yet intellectually rich reflections add another dimension to the history of human civilization. Entertaining and surprising, Food Is Culture is a fascinating look at how food is the ultimate embodiment of our continuing attempts to tame, transform, and reinterpret nature.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #101208 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 168 pages

Review
"A worthwhile indulgence." -- Eve Lichtgarn, Associated Content "To read this disarming collection of brief essays is to witness a superbly stocked mind grappling with matters that are vital to human survival." -- Tim Morris, Wilson Quarterly "Montanari here has provided students of anthropology with a wonderful text... Recommended." -- Library Journal "Eloquent and shrewd." -- Ken Hirschkop, Radical Philosophy

Review

"If you've never thought of a book on food and culture as a page turner, think again. In short, lively sections of Massimo Montanari's eye-opening study produce riveting perceptions of food in its broadest cultural perspective. His arguments are as fresh as they are learned and are as likely to offer challenging new perspectives as to turn conventional wisdom upside down. There's no question that his ground-breaking work adds immensely to what we know and how we think about the culture of food and gastronomy." -- Carol Field, author of The Italian Baker, Celebrating Italy and In Nonna's Kitchen

"A worthwhile indulgence." -- Eve Lichtgarn, Associated Content

"To read this disarming collection of brief essays is to witness a superbly stocked mind grappling with matters that are vital to human survival." -- Tim Morris, Wilson Quarterly

"Montanari here has provided students of anthropology with a wonderful text... Recommended." -- Library Journal

Review

Massimo Montanari is professor of medieval history and history of food at the University of Bologna. He has achieved wide recognition for his many searching and thoroughly researched studies of culinary traditions. Since 1979 he has authored and coauthored more than a dozen books, including Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History (Columbia), Food: A Culinary History (Columbia), Famine and Plenty: The History of Food in Europe, and the recent Bologna la Grassa.

Albert Sonnenfeld, longtime professor of Romance languages and literature at Princeton and Chevalier Professor of French/Italian at the University of Southern California, is series editor for Columbia University Press's Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History, which has published his translations of Giovanni Rebora's Culture of the Fork and Jean-Louis Flandrin and Massimo Montanari's Food: A Culinary History.

Customer Reviews

The Montanari Way
As an American boy growing up in France, we had only to hop it down to the local grocery to find the very best terrine. Massimo Montanari, author of a new compendium of his food columns, has written an exciting book about how and why people (especially in the Wrst) became interested in eating as an aesthetic proposition. Just yesterday here in San Francisco, I had the strange experience of having one of Montanari's columns come to life, as at a festive Thanksgiving dinner, someone brought a heaping box of cranberry flavored biscotti, explaining that the Italian bakeries of North Beach made them only at Thanksgiving and Christmas, for there's no market for them at other times of the year.

Exactly, Massimo Montanari would exclaim. One of his chapters shows how once a dish is associated with Christmas, you never see it the whole year round, and some foods (gingerbread for example) have been unfairly stigmatized with this "Christmas branding," although anybody could enjoy a nice piece of gingerbread in any season except that culturally, it would revolt us and most of us, even if we were starving, shipwrecked with Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Sun and the rest of the cast of LOST, on a desert island, most of us would turn up our noses at gingerbread. Brillat Savarin said it best, "Tell me what you eat anbd I'll tell you what you are," but canny old Massimo Montanari turns the good Frenchman upside his head to produce a slew of new apercus.

He knows his history backwards and forewards. When, for example, did Europeans introduce the custom of providing salad, sherbet, or just plain still water between courses? Montanari knows! And, he theorizes: would you ever suspect that the popularity of McDonalds is at least partially due to its providing the atavistic thrill of eating with one's hands, a practice that has been gradually taken from us since its heyday in the Middle Ages?

Even if you think you're not interested in food, this book will make you wonder how much of it is you, and how much of you is it.