Customer Reviews

Sacred Food: Cooking for Spiritual Nourishment

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In Sacred Food: Cooking For Spiritual Nourishment, award-winning food writer Elisabeth Luard takes the reader on a fascinating and inspiring survey of dishes traditionally served at significant and celebatory moments ranging from birth, puberty, courtship, and betrothal, to marriage, death, burial, and remembrance. Along the way Luard illuminates how and why we celebrate such human milestones with food. Superb images showcase a wealth of recipes and myriad cultures from Mexico, Japan, Spain, Italy, and Indonesia, to North American, the Middle East, Germany, Scandinavia, and Britain. From Mushroom Piroshki for an Eastern European birth basket, to Kerala Coconut Curry prepared for an Indian wedding feast, Sacred Food offers more than 40 sumptuous recipes to delight, educate, and please the palate. Sacred Foods is highly recommended for culinary gourmets and students of the cultural role food plays in human societies around the world.

Thank God I didn't purchase this book. Firstly, the concept for this book is a great one, which is why it is so unfortunate that this author did such bad job with it. I was interested in this book when, as I was preparing for the new year, I had the idea to prepare a spiritually nourishing new year's first meal. So I sought out this book for ideas. The organization of the book is flawed to begin with - grouping up wildly different cultures together under 4 categories. Although these are very important categories, the author betrays her cultural ignorance by this very approach. Her attitude and tone is typically patronizing, paternalistic and fetishizing of foreign cultures as if they all amount to these quaint folksy little traditions. She does this especially when she is referencing a culture from the so-called "third world". Her treatment of Africa is downright racist with its broad generalizations and crass, cursory, under-researched fair. I should have known that it would be from the very description listed on this site - amazon.com. In the amazon.com description, it references meals from Mexico, Slovakia and then refers to a meal used in an "African girl's" coming of age ceremony. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure Africa is not one country with one tradition but a whole continent of 54 countries (and counting) with HUNDREDS of ethnic groups and THOUSANDS of traditions. Her inclusion of Africa seemed to be more or less out of obligation or perhaps pressure from her wanna-be politically-correct publisher. All in all, if you have any self-respect at all, avoid this book at all costs. Don't patronize ignorance!

I got this book as a requirment for my class. There are only 3 chapters in this book. I felt like it just dragged on and on. It really needed to have more breaks. It had very interesting topics about food and rituals, but it wasn't a very smooth read. It bored me. The pictures are great and I like how it includes some recipes, but this book won't be living on my shelf any longer.