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Until the early nineteenth century, political philosophy and
economics were dining companions. Both took up fundamental
questions of how we should feed one another. But with the rise of
corporate capitalism, modern economics lost sight of its primary
task and turned away from the complexities of real people's
sustenance in favor of the single-minded pursuit of money. In Meals
Matter, Michael Symons returns economics to its roots in the
distribution of food and the labor required. Setting the table with
vivid descriptions of conviviality, he offers a gastronomic
rebuttal to the narrow worldview of mainstream economics. Engaging
with a wide variety of thinkers-including Epicurus, Enlightenment
philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the gastronomer
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, and economic theorists from Francois
Quesnay and Adam Smith through the neoliberals-Symons traces how we
went astray and how we can find our way back to a more caring,
sustainable way of life. He finds hope for shared "table pleasure"
in institutions like community gardens, street markets, and
banquets and in eating fresh, local, and "slow" food. An
innovative, historically based argument at the intersection of food
history and social thought, Meals Matter challenges us to reject
the economics of greed in favor of a community-based economics of
sharing and gastronomic enjoyment.
Named Best Culinary History Book at the Salon International du
Livre Gourmand (Fifth World Cookbook Fair), Perigueux, France
Winner, Bronze Ladle in the Best Food Book division, World Food
Media Awards Never has there been so little need to cook. Yet
Michael Symons maintains that to be truly human we need to become
better cooks: practical and generous sharers of food. Fueled by
James Boswell's definition of humans as cooking animals (for "no
beast can cook"), Symons sets out to explore the civilizing role of
cooks in history. His wanderings take us to the clay ovens of the
prehistoric eastern Mediterranean and the bronze cauldrons of
ancient China, to fabulous banquets in the temples and courts of
Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Persia, to medieval English cookshops and
southeast Asian street markets, to palace kitchens, diners, and to
moderns fast-food eateries. Symons samples conceptions and
perceptions of cooks and cooking, from Plato and Descartes to Marx
and Virginia Woolf, asking why cooks, despite their vital and
central role in sustaining life, have remained in the shadows,
unheralded, unregarded, and underappreciated. "People think of
meals as occasions where you share food," he notes. "They rarely
think of cooks as sharers of food." Considering such notions as the
physical and political consequences of sauce, connections between
food and love, and cooking as a regulator of clock and calendar,
Symons provides a spirited and diverting defense of a cook-centered
view of the world.
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