Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family, and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence [Paperback]

Carole M. Counihan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 4, 2004 | ISBN-10: 0415946735 | ISBN-13: 978-0415946735 | Edition: 1

In this delicious book, noted food scholar Carole M. Counihan presents a compelling and artfully told narrative about family and food in late 20th-century Florence. Based on solid research, Counihan examines how family, and especially gender have changed in Florence since the end of World War II to the present, giving us a portrait of the changing nature of modern life as exemplified through food and foodways.

Editorial Reviews

Review

A labor of love and mature scholarschip, Around the Tuscan Table is an eloquent chronicle of major social transformations. By giving voice to ordinary people, Counihan offers a bittersweet tale of how Florentines experienced the modern dietary transition from poverty to abundance. -- Warren Belasco, editor of Food Nations
Carole Counihan's remarkable portrait of an extended Florentine family reveals how food is inextricably embedded in all aspects of life. Part ethnography, part culinary biography, Around the Tuscan Table provides a realistic look at how Italians really eat, and how issues of globalization, women in the workforce, and changing social mores are altering Italian foodways. -- Amy Bentley, author of Eating For Victory
Around the Tuscan Table will be of value to scholars who hear the food voice in their own studies of gender and social change. -- David E. Sutton, Southern Illinois University, Journal of Anthropological Research

About the Author

Carole M. Counihan is Professor of Anthropology and the Director of Women's Studies at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. She is currently the editor of Food and Foodways. She has authored and co-edited several books on the anthropology of food, including: Food in the U.S.A., Food and Culture, and The Anthropology of Food and Body (all published by Routledge).

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (March 4, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415946735
• ISBN-13: 978-0415946735
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #639,707 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Carole M. Counihan is Professor of Anthropology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she earned a BA in history cum laude from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts. Counihan's research centers on food, culture, gender, and identity in the United States and Italy. She conducted fieldwork in Bosa (Sardinia) and Florence (Tuscany), Italy during the 1970s and 1980s, and published "Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence" in 2004. Long fascinated with women's complex relationship with food and body, she explored gender, food, body, reproduction, and culture in her book "The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power" (Routledge, 1999). She is editor of "Food in the USA: A Reader" (Routledge 2002) and, with Penny Van Esterik, of "Food and Culture: A Reader" (Routledge 2008). She conducted fieldwork from 1996-2006 in a Hispanic community in Colorado, collecting food-centered life histories from nineteen women. Based on this research and supported by a 2005-2006 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, she authored "A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado" (University of Texas Press, 2009). She is editor of the scholarly journal "Food and Foodways." Counihan was a visiting professor at the University of Gastronomic Sciences Masters Program in Colorno (Parma), Italy, during Spring 2009 where she began a new ethnographic research project on food activism in local chapters of the Slow Food movement.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why we love Florence and Tuscany, November 16, 2004

By 

Janet A. Chrzan (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family, and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence (Paperback)

Have you ever wandered through a Florentine neighborhood before lunch, smelling indescribably good scents wafting through open windows, hearing families talk to each other, and wondering what it is they are doing, and what they are eating? If you have, this book is for you. Around the Tuscan Table is an endlessly interesting and very readable saga of how modern Florentine families and Florentine food have changed in the last few decades, rendering the mysterious stone streets and people of Florence infinitely more real for the traveler and Italophile. And this ethnography also provides great recipes for simple, tasty Florentine food; the straccoto recipe has become a family favorite. Straccoto is Italian pot roast, with the sauce served over pasta as a first course. It is delicious.

This book is a marvelous antidote to the endless up-market mythologizing of Tuscany. It seems that we simply can't get away from `Tuscany as the promised land' - a place where rich Brits and Americans can buy a farmhouse and pretend, a la Marie Antoinette, to be earth-grimed farmers - of artisanal olive oils. Tuscany has become a kind of iconic play-land for the wealthy and bored cosmopolitan. But what of the Tuscan people? As a frequent traveler to Tuscany, I am thrilled that this book has been published. For too long the writing of all things Tuscan has been from the perspective of the expatriate - the émigré viewing a mythologized culture viewing the émigré, with the Tuscan landscape and people somehow magically preserved in a state of 19th century splendor, or squalor, depending on the purse of the observing expat and the state of the `villa' she or he has purchased. Dr. Counihan's book provides us with a welcome picture of how Florentines live and eat - as well as some of the best and simplest recipes for home cooked Tuscan meals available.

Rather than assuming an unchanging social and physical landscape, Dr. Counihan chronicles the changes in place, attitudes, habits, and social relations over decades among the family of her ex-husband. Her training is in anthropology, and she is a well-known and highly-respected scholar of food and identity, so it is inevitable that her book should focus on food as a metaphor for social change through time. However, this is no dry anthropological tome, it is readable, interesting, and highly informative. By relying on the many years that she lived in Italy, married to an Italian, she is able to give us a picture of Italian life not available to many Americans. She also teaches us about food change - how prosperity has altered Italian habits and attitudes, and how Italians feel about the many changes their country has undergone since World War II. We, as outsiders and traveling Americans, often view the Italian people as somehow unchanging, unmoving in culture and tradition. This book changes that perspective, allowing us to view the dynamism and modernity of Florentine families - and to have a much better understanding of why the streets of Florence smell so good at lunchtime... and why the mystique of Tuscan food and livelihoods is so compelling to Americans.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What's Happening to Food, Gender and Family in Italy, August 1, 2007

By 

Mimi Sheller (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family, and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence (Paperback)

Around the Tuscan Table addresses one of the fundamental questions in the anthropology of food, as for example raised by Sidney Mintz in his work Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: how do food cultures change over time and come to incorporate completely novel foods while giving up other habits of centuries? It also addresses one of the fundamental questions in the sociology of food: how do traditional agrarian food systems come to be displaced by modern food provisioning systems that are less healthy and more ecologically destructive?

What is remarkable about this work is that it really illustrates the intimate relation between a regional economy and a regional culture of food, and how the two change together through a social history of agrarian change and the emergence of modern foodways. And the pivot on which this relation turns is the question of women's and men's roles in productive and reproductive labor, and the centrality of food to drawing gendered distinctions in work, status, and power. The book presents a very nuanced picture of how the different forms of work performed by men and women, and the different economic opportunities available to them, shape the patterns and styles of cooking, the temporalities of shopping and the timing of meals, and the overall foodways of an entire regional culture.

Prof. Counihan has a wonderful grasp of the subtleties of the reproduction of subordination. Rather than depicting a timeless culture of macho men and sacrificing women, she shows us exactly how both men and women together reproduce those patterns over time, much as Paul Willis showed in his Learning to Labor how working class kids get working class jobs. This might be subtitled, how Italian women get Italian husbands and sons, and end up cooking and cleaning for them. But she also shows us how the struggle to shift gendered positions produces shifts in food cultures, as women first are isolated in the private home in the process of transition from an agrarian to an urban economy, and then come to enter the waged workforce while still bearing the burden of domestic work. And in so doing the power of the woman as family cook, and the traditions of Tuscan food culture, are both eroded by new forms of shopping, cooking and eating. Women make certain gains, but they also lose a great deal.

We see modernization here as a real two-edged sword, bringing an abundance of food but taking away the time and the capacity to cook it and to savor it. We feel a real sense of loss for the old foodways, and even for the period of hunger and poverty that shaped the early to mid-twentieth century, as a time when food really was dreamed of and desired, special dishes were cooked only on special occasions, and food had a seasonality and stronger flavors linked to the land. The Slow Food movement has reinvented some of the attention to quality, flavor and locality that were simply taken for granted in the past.

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastically delicious, October 17, 2008

By 

sak - See all my reviews

This review is from: Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family, and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence (Paperback)

Counihan set out to examine Florentine foodways through interviews with twenty-three members of an extended family broken down into, an older generation, a middle generation, and a younger generation. Counihan lived in Italy from 1968-1984; she was immersed in the culture and more importantly immersed within the family portrayed in this book. She points out that anthropologists have paid little attention to Italy's rich and diverse urban culture. To recify this, she seeks to fill this gap in anthropological research by focusing on food to discuss Florentine identity, family, gender, history, culture, and society. Even though Counihan's book is geared toward fellow anthropologists her writing style is accessible to all. The book is easily read and understood, she also avoids using the technical jargon that is so common to academic writing and often quite confusing to people outside of the discipline.

This book is a fascinating portrayal of Florentine cuisine and culture from the perspective of ordinary citizens. Counihan's close relationship with the interviewee's allows for an intimate portrayal of the Florentine foodways through their food-based memories. The book is well-written, engaging, well researched, and most of all entertaining.