Editor’s introduction. To provoke and to please

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Editor’s introduction. To provoke and to please 1
4. Appetites
5. Women Who Eat Dirt 10
6. Badlands: Portrait of a Competitive Eater 23
7. “Don’t Eat That”: The Erotics of Abstinence in American Christianity 34
8. A Shallot 51
9. The family table
10. Delicacy 54
11. The Unbearable Lightness of Wartime Cuisine 60
12. One Year and a Day: A Recipe for Gumbo and Mourning 75
13. The Prize Inside 87
14. Messages in a Bottle 89
15. Dinner, 1933 100
16. Social constructs
17. Otto Horcher, Caterer to the Third Reich 104
18. The Cooking Ape: An Interview with Richard Wrangham 116
19. How Caviar Turned Out to Be Halal 129
20. “La grande bouffe”: Cooking Shows as Pornography 139
21. Recipe for S&M Marmalade 149
22. The art of food
23. Man Ray’s Electricité 152
24. Food + Clothing = 158
25. Vik Muniz’s Ten Ten’s Weed Necklace 170
26. Zhan Wang: Urban Landscape 174
27. The First Still Life 178
28. Personal journeys
29. Waiting for a Cappuccino: A Brief Layover along the Spice Trail 182
30. Include Me Out 187
31. Evacuation Day, or A Foodie Is Bummed Out 190
32. Ripe Peach 194
33. How others eat
34. My McDonald’s 198
35. Great Apes as Food 202
36. The Bengali Bonti 212
37. The Best “Chink” Food: Dog Eating and the Dilemma of Diversity 218
38. Close to the earth
39. Organic in Mexico: A Conversation with Diana Kennedy 234
40. Mr. Clarence Jones, Carolina Rice Farmer 247
41. “GM or Death”: Food and Choice in Zambia 255
42. Wine, Place, and Identity in a Changing Climate 267
43. Episode with a Potato 277
44. Technologies
45. A Plea for Culinary Modernism: Why We Should Love New, Fast, Processed Food 280
46. The Patented Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich: Food as Intellectual Property 293
47. The Clockwork Roasting Jack, or How Technology Entered the Kitchen 302
48. Grinding Away the Rust: The Legacy of Iceland’s Herring Oil and Meal Factories 314
49. Pleasures of the past
50. A la recherche de la tomate perdue: The First French Tomato Recipe? 326
51. The Egg Cream Racket 332
52. Frightening the Game 345
53. Alkermes: “A Liqueur of Prodigious Strength” 347
54. Food for Thought 356
55. Acknowledgments 358
56. Contributors 359
57. Illustration Credits 365