Since the founding of the United States, culinary texts and practices have played a crucial role in the making of cultural identities and social hierarchies. A Taste of Power examines culinary writing and practices as forces for the production of social order and, at the same time, points of cultural resistance. Culinary writing has helped shape dominant ideas of nationalism, gender, and sexuality, suggesting that eating right is a gateway to becoming an American, a good citizen, an ideal man, or a perfect wife and mother. In this brilliant interdisciplinary work, Katharina Vester examines how cookbooks became a way for women to participate in nation-building before they had access to the vote or public office, for Americans to distinguish themselves from Europeans, for middle-class authors to assert their class privileges, for men to claim superiority over women in the kitchen, and for lesbian authors to insert themselves into the heteronormative economy of culinary culture. A Taste of Power engages in close reading of a wide variety of sources and genres to uncover the intersections of food, politics, and privilege in American culture.

In an age of globaliation, computeriation, and commodification, why read poetry? This most literary, most artificial, and least profitable genre seems ill suited to meet todays challenges. Or is it? This volume, demonstrates the opposite. Scholars and poets from five countries discuss the nature and the function of poetic experiment in our rapidly changing world.

Kornelia Freitag is chair of American studies at Ruhr-Universitat Bochum (Germany).

Katharina Vester teaches American studies at American University in Washington, D.C. (U.S.A.)

Join Katharina Vestre on an adventure to relive your very first moments. From your first cell to your first breath, this is your story as you have never heard it before. Did you know it took three attempts to make your kidneys? Or that tiny twirling hairs on your back showed your other organs where to go? Or that hiccups are probably a legacy from our ancient, underwater ancestors? With cutting-edge science and a wry sense of humour, Vestre reveals all this and more. Like: how sperm know which way to swim. Why sex and gender are more complicated than one might think. What you have in common with every living being, and why you are unique. Set off on a true voyage of discovery through an inner universe whose secrets we are still unravelling. A miniature drama of cosmic significance, this is the story of how you became you.

Since the founding of the United States, culinary texts and practices have played a crucial role in the making of cultural identities and social hierarchies. A Taste of Power examines culinary writing and practices as forces for the production of social order and, at the same time, points of cultural resistance. Culinary writing has helped shape dominant ideas of nationalism, gender, and sexuality, suggesting that eating right is a gateway to becoming an American, a good citizen, an ideal man, or a perfect wife and mother. In this brilliant interdisciplinary work, Katharina Vester examines how cookbooks became a way for women to participate in nation-building before they had access to the vote or public office, for Americans to distinguish themselves from Europeans, for middle-class authors to assert their class privileges, for men to claim superiority over women in the kitchen, and for lesbian authors to insert themselves into the heteronormative economy of culinary culture. A Taste of Power engages in close reading of a wide variety of sources and genres to uncover the intersections of food, politics, and privilege in American culture.