100 Books Like Eating in Theory

Haraway’s book struck me like lightning. Here was a book that seemed to address relations between species in terms usually restricted to humans.

Many people, including social historians, have meaningfully described social formations in terms of various kinds of dependency and collaboration, for instance, slavery, feudalism, and companionship. After all, human-animal relations deserve a similar perspective. Human relations with dogs, cats, and birds, for instance, could be described in terms of a diversity of ranks and hierarchies. For other contexts involving domestic animals (including cows, reindeer, and horses), the language of slavery and servitude might be more relevant.

Haraway’s approach not only helps to illuminate complex nuances of modern biotechnology, to me it also seems vital at a time of escalating extinctions caused by humans. 

I love that Basso can take me so far inside someone's mind that I can begin to understand not just what they think and feel but how and why they think and feel it.

This book contains the very systems and processes that we use to make knowledge and meaning, and I love learning about a way of knowing and making meaning that is very different from mine—entirely logical, purposeful, valid, and different from mine. 

I love this book because Tsing walks me through an increasingly complex, increasingly comprehensive understanding of how people think, feel, and make meaning and how that process is fundamental to understanding who we are as a species.

Each chapter gives me a basic yet profound bit of insight into people as meaning makers, and each chapter flows from the one(s) previous, all building toward the sort of “holy crap, I get it!” culmination that leaves me wanting to go back and read it again and again.

Tsing makes the complicated understandable and the obscure accessible. 

I love that Ingold uses the concept of design to explore how people make meaning and things meaningful. By bringing me through lenses such as architecture, archaeology, and art, he shows me that design is not a process of doing but of making.

When we design, we do so by constructing meaning and knowledge. The artifacts that come from my design thinking are secondary effects of the thinking and meaning-making. I love being brought into a larger point of view on the everyday activities of my own life.

Food in History is a pioneer work on the deceptively simple theme. Its purpose is to examine the forces which have shaped the nature of man’s diet throughout the course of thirty thousand years and to show, without special pleading, something of the way in which the pursuit of more and better food has helped to direct – sometimes decisively, more often subtly – the movement of history itself. To demonstrate, in effect, that in some senses, at least food is history.

This book literally walks the reader through the history of food, how we evolved from foraging to an agrarian community, and how supermarkets evolved from farmers markets. Weaving food into politics, religion, and economics Food in History is an expose on humanity's complex relationship with food and our reliance on both produce and meat as the basis of the human omnivore diet.   

I was quite taken by Laudan’s attention to the preparation of foods, from deep time to the present, in many of the regions of the world. She is attentive to mixtures: in any dish, in the kinds of dishes served for meals of different kinds, in the sharing and exchanging of tastes, and in the close relationships between dining and worship.

Beginning with the simple motions of a woman grinding grain on stone for the daily meal, or pounding hulls in a vessel, to the innumerable kitchen attendants needed to turn raw materials into ingredients for palace feasts, or the labor-saving kitchen appliances of fast-paced modernity, the ability to break bread in community has long depended on local ecologies and ways of life, as well as human ability to make the best of what is to hand. In fact, she sees the rise of distinctive world food cultures not as… show more.

This isn’t just a book—it’s a feat of cultural anthropology, an ark of the world’s wondrous and unique food cultures on the brink of erasure due to the encroachment of industrial food and globalization. The photos are mesmerizing, and the accounts of the families are both fascinating and heartrending.

I keep this book on my desk and open it anytime I have a little downtime. I can disappear into the world of, say, subsistence farmers in Bhutan or marvel over the mouthwatering array of dishes a Turkish mom churns out for her family of six from a one-bedroom apartment in Istanbul. I never cease to be amazed—or hungry.

“They came hungry,” begins the first chapter of this delightful look at the gastronomy of America’s desert quarter.

The whole dining table is here: huevos rancheros, tamales, chili, oranges, russet potatoes, rotgut whiskey, the chimichanga (which McNamee calls “a crispy torpedo of goodness”) and the Apache home-brewed beer called tiswin.

It’s one thing to enjoy Southwestern cooking. It’s another to understand its roots.

At our house, we love books that allow us to visit new worlds. This book explores food from 13 different countries across the globe and will make you want to travel all the way around the world (or maybe just go to a local restaurant for now) to try all the delicious dishes.

From Sweden to Nigeria and Pakistan to Peru, it’s interesting and tantalizing to learn more about each place through what’s on their plates.

Eating, one of my favorite daily rituals, is contiguous with my love of smelling and cooking.  Most of what we consider to be the flavor of food arises from retronasal olfaction (the olfactory pathway from the back of the nose). And a great deal of our gustatory experiences are created from a confluence of multiple sensory channels within our headspace.

This piece of knowledge and many others are wonderfully covered in this book. Bringing to bear his cutting-edge research on mutli-modal perception, Spence provides what is to my mind the most enjoyable scientific introduction of gustatory perception and in particular an in depth explanation of why eating and drinking, when done well, are on of life’s greatest (multi-modal) pleasures.