 Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Meal Books In Print, Audio Books. |
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Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Meal
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Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Meal Customer Reviews
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An Original
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It's hard to imagine now how revolutionary books like this were back when Much Depends on Dinner was published in 1986. It was barely conceivable then that someone would write a book, an actual book about something so ordinary as a meal of corn on the cob with butter and salt, chicken, lettuce with olive oil and lemon dressing and ice cream. History was supposed to be reserved for the manly pursuits of war and politics with occasional detours to economy and science.
We are much more comfortable now with the notion that real life (and therefore real history) is about the ordinary and that the mysteries worth exploring are the ones wrapped in dailiness. Way before her time, Visser made the point that "...forms of things are a kind of language, speaking the logos of our culture...". In short, that to truly understand ourselves , we need to understand the things that are so common that we scarcely notice them at all.
Her pioneering work helped open up a floodgate. We have excellent books about Cod [[ASIN:0140275010 Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World]] and Salt[[ASIN:0142001619 Salt: A World History]], Chocolate[[ASIN:0500286965 The True History of Chocolate, Second Edition]] and olive oil[[ASIN:0811861767 Olive Oil: From Tree to Table]]. There are so many books about the history of wine that there's no place for them in a brief review.
What matters, it seems to me, is that these histories aren't just about the substances being discussed. Can Cod really be said to have a history?
They are instead, about how our interaction with these things has shaped us and our world. For many readers, this represents a great advance over all that stuff about kings and presidents.
Lynn Hoffman, author of [[ASIN:0131186361 New Short Course in Wine,The]] which owes its existence in part to Visser breaking the trail and to the thoroughly food-filled [[ASIN:1601640005 bang BANG: A Novel]]. |
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