Customer Reviews

How We Eat: Appetite, Culture, and the Psychology of Food

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a fun little volume, written by a psychologist who clearly loves food. Rappoport hits many of the high points in academic research on the subject, from an interdisciplinary perspective. He writes clearly and with an up-beat, entertaining style. As another review mentioned, this would be a good book for a holiday at the beach; and if you're interested in a quick, light read on food, or a nice gloss on the subject of food from academic perspectives, this is a decent choice.

Unfortunately there is not much else to recommend, as the work is mostly derivative. Apparently our author has read Counihan and Van Esterik's _Food and Culture_ reader; a lot of what he mentions comes from essays they included there. Rappoport's summaries of these and other works and thinkers are somewhat lacking in detail and finesse: occasionally he's even downright wrong. He tends to present his findings as bald-faced assertions, lacking nuance, and doesn't provide any particularly interesting or insightful information that hasn't been said, many times before, elsewhere.

A decent read but lacking in detail and originality. On the whole one gets the impression that the author has undertaken a somewhat limited survey of part of the literature in the domain under consideration, and quickly written a book on the results, without the intervention of considered thought in between. A reasonable effort, but with nothing new to report. Not recommended.

An excellent read for anyone who eats food. You will gain a greater understanding of the complex relationship you have with food. The author has a wide background and has done extensive work in many fields. But hey, this is not a dry read. Wise humor peppers the pages making this book deliciously entertaining, insightful and helpful. I devoured it and would recommend it for gift giving, your summer vacation or weekend at the beach.
Dr Tim

This book is both thought-provoking and entertaining. As the author argues, despite the large role that food plays in our lives, there appears to be no unifying framework that can explain eating behavior. Despite the complexity, the author does a nice job of blending theory, empirical findings, history, and personal anecdotes. In the end, more questions are raised than are answered- a characteristic of a topic worth exploring.

Well researched, culture-inclusive and fun to read, not just a dry text. A feast for the mind, and well timed as we are more and more, world wide, becoming mindless consumers of copious quantities of munchies, whether in elite settings or otherwise.

"How we eat" is a fairly uninteresting book that, happily, is breezily written, this making it fast to read and allowing the reader to find that there seems to be no point without undue waste of time and without becoming too angry at the lack of research or fact-checking (of minor points, such as the page 181 reference to Doc Marten boots).
The book comprises armchair musings on various aspects of food, heavily flavored with facile Freudian analyses (suitably lacking in rigor, as befits psychoanalytic "theory"), with some Marxian analysis thrown, but not well mixed, in.
Unfortunately, I really cannot think of any point in reading this book. I read it because I'd already bought it and carried it with me to bide the waiting time during a thorough medical exam. I wish I'd brought (and bought) something else.
The best thing about this book is the cover: the illustration by John Martin is stunning, but you can see it on this page, can't you?

Rappoport's "How We Eat" does describe many ways of considering and consuming food, however the sum of these descriptions and random narratives and quotations adds to very little. Interesting, sometimes amusing, rarely useful.

In this book, Leon Rappoport does an excellent job in introducing interesting insights into the "why" of food. His arguments are well organized and thought provoking. My interest on this subject is next to none so I personally didn't enjoy the book much, but for those interested in food and the psychology behind it, this is a great read.

i just finished this book in one day and really enjoyed it. i'd say 4.4 stars...the author mentions a few times (seemingly randomly) in this book the term 'marxism' or 'as a marxist would say...' which is ok but he didn't develop the idea as well as he could have to show the relevance of his point...

the title itself is accurate in that the author addresses very well all the aspects of food in our habits, culture, perspective, history etc of food. it's hard to find good books on 'nutritional anthropology' (a narrow topic) but this does a good job.

if you're a foodie especially, or even if you're into anthropology or psychology in general, you'll like this book.