Showing results for "World Politics" in Gastronomy

For most of history, humans did without refined sugar. Granulated sugar was first produced in India around the sixth century BC, yet for almost 2,500 years afterward sugar remained marginal in the diets of most people. Then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How did sugar find its way into almost all the food we eat, fostering illness and ecological crisis along the way? The World of Sugar begins with the earliest evidence of sugar production.

Focusing on contemporary practices, The Culinary Imagination traces the social, aesthetic, and political history of food from myth to modernity, from ancient sources to our current wave of food mania. What does it mean to transform raw stuff into cooked dishes, which then become part of our own bodies; to savor festive meals yet resolve to renounce gluttony; to act as predators where in another life we might have become prey?

Neither an advocate nor a critic of cultured meat, Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft spent five years researching the phenomenon. In Meat Planet, he reveals how debates about lab-grown meat reach beyond debates about food, examining the links between appetite, growth, and capitalism. Could satiating the growing appetite for meat actually lead to our undoing? Are we simply using one technology to undo the damage caused by another? Like all problems in our food system, the meat problem is not merely a problem of production. It is intrinsically social and political.

Mark Kurlansky, winner of the James Beard Award for Excellence in Food Writing, leads us on a mouthwatering culinary tour around the world and through history and culture from the fifth century B.C. to the present day. This wonderful collection contains essays by Plato on the art of cooking, Pablo Neruda on french fries, and many other writers on the passions of cuisine.