In this sweeping chronicle of guarana-a glossy-leaved Amazonian vine packed with more caffeine than any other plant-Seth Garfield develops a wide-ranging approach to the history of Brazil itself. The story begins with guarana as the pre-Columbian cultivar of the Satere-Mawe people in the Lower Amazon region, where it figured centrally in the Indigenous nation's origin stories, dietary regimes, and communal ceremonies. During subsequent centuries of Portuguese colonialism and Brazilian rule, guarana was reformulated by settlers, scientists, folklorists, food technologists, and marketers. Whether in search of pleasure, profits, professional distinction, or patriotic markers, promoters imparted new meanings and uses to guarana. Today, it is the namesake ingredient of a multibillion-dollar soft drink industry and a beloved national symbol. Guarana's journey elucidates human impacts on Amazonian ecosystems; the circulation of knowledge, goods, and power; and the promise of modernity in Latin America's largest nation. For Garfield, the beverage's cross-cultural history reveals not only the structuring of inequalities in Brazil but also the mythmaking and ordering of social practices that constitute so-called traditional and modern societies.

The Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2011. In keeping with this happy event, celebration was the subject of this year's meeting. Symposiasts have taken their usual broad and generous approach to the topic. So papers range in geographical relevance from highland Equador through Transylvania, Anatolia, Congo-Brazzaville, Iceland, and old Los Angeles. Chronologically too, several periods are addressed: ancient Rome, Ptolomaic Egypt, Ottoman Turkey, Georgian Dublin, and Victorian London. The occasions of celebration considered run from wedding breakfasts, birthday parties, Easter, harvest festival, and Passover, while the sorts of celebration include banquets, drinking bouts, the Icelandic thorrablot, and election day feasts. Authors include from America, Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus, Anthony Buccini, Sharon Hudgins, Charles Perry; from Turkey, Aylin Tan and Priscilla Mary Isin; from England, Robert Appelbaum, Andrew Dalby, Christopher Grocock, Gillian Riley, David C. Sutton, and from Israel, Susan Weingarten.

When her mother passed along a cookbook made and assembled by her grandmother, Erica Abrams Locklear thought she knew what to expect. But rather than finding a homemade cookbook full of apple stack cake, leather britches, pickled watermelon, or other "traditional" mountain recipes, Locklear discovered recipes for devil's food cake with coconut icing, grape catsup, and fig pickles. Some recipes even relied on food products like Bisquick, Swans Down flour, and Calumet baking powder. Where, Locklear wondered, did her Appalachian food script come from? And what implicit judgments had she made about her grandmother based on the foods she imagined she would have been interested in cooking? Appalachia on the Table argues, in part, that since the conception of Appalachia as a distinctly different region from the rest of the South and the United States, the foods associated with the region and its people have often been used to socially categorize and stigmatize mountain people. Rather than investigate the actual foods consumed in Appalachia, Locklear instead focuses on the representations of foods consumed, implied moral judgments about those foods, and how those judgments shape reader perceptions of those depicted. The question at the core of Locklear's analysis asks, How did the dominant culinary narrative of the region come into existence and what consequences has that narrative had for people in the mountains?