The Gastronomica Reader

Described in the 2008 Saveur 100 as "At the top of our bedside reading pile since its inception in 2001," the award-winning Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture is a quarterly feast of truly exceptional writing on food. Designed both to entertain and to provoke, The Gastronomica Reader now offers a sumptuous sampling from the journal's pages--including essays, poetry, interviews, memoirs, and an outstanding selection of the artwork that has made Gastronomica so distinctive. In words and images, it takes us around the globe, through time, and into a dazzling array of cultures, investiga.

Editor's Introduction; appetites; Women Who Eat Dirt; Badlands: Portrait of a Competitive Eater; "Don't Eat That": The Erotics of Abstinence in American Christianity; A Shallot; the family table; Delicacy; The Unbearable Lightness of Wartime Cuisine; One Year and a Day: A Recipe for Gumbo and Mourning; The Prize Inside; Messages in a Bottle; dinner, 1933; social constructs; Otto Horcher, Caterer to the Third Reich; The Cooking Ape: An Interview with Richard Wrangham; How Caviar Turned Out to Be Halal.

"La grande bouffe": Cooking Shows as PornographyRecipe for S & M Marmalade; the art of food; Man Ray's Electricité; Food + Clothing =; Vik Muniz's Ten Ten's Weed Necklace; Zhan Wang: Urban Landscape; The First Still Life; personal journeys; Waiting for a Cappuccino: A Brief Layover along the Spice Trail; Include Me Out; Evacuation Day, or A Foodie Is Bummed Out; Ripe Peach; how others eat; My McDonald's; Great Apes as Food; The Bengali Bonti; The Best "Chink" Food: Dog Eating and the Dilemma of Diversity; close to the earth; Organic in Mexico: A Conversation with Diana Kennedy.

Mr. Clarence Jones, Carolina Rice Farmer"GM or Death": Food and Choice in Zambia; Wine, Place, and Identi…