Customer Reviews

Food Food Is Culture (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History)

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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.

This is an opportunity for enjoyable and thought provoking reading.
The metaphor of "food as language" proved very versatile for academic purposes.
I have used Montanari's ideas to put together a short introduction to a
Marketing in the Food Sector module. My students can now relate media language with
"food language" in meaningful and imaginative ways.

I am a fan of the books that tie history and food together, so it was with great anticipation that I bought this book. It seemed like it would be ripe with topics, and since it was relatively new, it would be relevant in discussions or even sharing with a class.

The writing is so painfully verbose that I could barely read more than a few pages at a time, and even upon returning to it to browse for more direct statements about the author's pet theories, I had to put it down out of frustration. The author is fond of hearing himself "speak", and as such, uses a dialogue that bores the reader to the point of losing interest in the subject. I am a life-long food and beverage person, with hundreds of books in my collection, each beloved as the next; but, I simply could not in good conscience recommend this book to anyone hoping to be enlightened in the history and relevance of food and cultures. It was egregiously boring.