The Taste for Civilization

Author: Janet A. Flammang
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252076737
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Book Description
This book explores the idea that table activities--the mealtime rituals of food preparation, serving, and dining--lay the foundation for a proper education on the value of civility, the importance of the common good, and what it means to be a good citizen. The arts of conversation and diplomatic speech are learned and practiced at tables, and a political history of food practices recasts thoughtfulness and generosity as virtues that enhance civil society and democracy. In our industrialized and profit-centered culture, however, foodwork is devalued and civility is eroding. Looking at the field of American civility, Janet A. Flammang addresses the gendered responsibilities for foodwork's civilizing functions and argues that any formulation of "civil society" must consider food practices and the household. To allow space for practicing civility, generosity, and thoughtfulness through everyday foodwork, Americans must challenge the norms of unbridled consumerism, work-life balance, and domesticity and caregiving. Connecting political theory with the quotidian activities of the dinner table, Flammang discusses practical ideas from the "delicious revolution" and Slow Food movement to illustrate how civic activities are linked to foodwork, and she points to farmers' markets and gardens in communities, schools, and jails as sites for strengthening civil society and degendering foodwork.

Food

Author: Paul Freedman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520254763
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Book Description
This richly illustrated book applies the discoveries of the new generation of food historians to the pleasures of dining and the culinary accomplishments of diverse civilizations, past and present. Freedman gathers essays by French, German, Belgian, American, and British historians to present a comprehensive, chronological history of taste.

Food Fights & Culture Wars

Author: Tom Nealon
Publisher: ABRAMS
ISBN: 1468314521
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
In this eclectic book of food history, Tom Nealon takes on such overlooked themes as carp and the Crusades, brown sauce and Byron, and chillies and cannibalism, and suggests that hunger and taste are the twin forces that secretly defined the course of civilization. Through war and plague, revolution and migration, people have always had to eat. What and how they ate provoked culinary upheaval around the world as ingredients were traded and fought over, and populations desperately walked the line between satiety and starvation. Parallel to the history books, a second, more obscure history was also being recorded in the cookbooks of the time, which charted the evolution of meals and the transmission of ingredients around the world. Food Fights and Culture Wars: A Secret History of Taste explores the mysteries at the intersection of food and society, and attempts to make sense of the curious area between fact and fiction. Beautifully illustrated with material from the collection of the British Library, this wide-ranging book addresses some of the fascinating, forgotten stories behind everyday dishes and processes. Among many conspiracies and controversies, the author meditates on the connections between the French Revolution and table settings, food thickness and colonialism, and lemonade and the Black Plague.

Civilization

Author: Regis Debray
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788734068
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
American civilization’s dominance over Europe—and what to do about it In 1900, an American of taste was a European in exile; in 2000, a trendy European is a frustrated American—or one waiting for a visa. Régis Debray explores America’s global cultural ascendancy in this provocative and witty analysis of our contemporary condition. Whereas Europe once foregrounded the importance of time and writing, America is a civilization of spectacle and kinetics, blind to the tragic complexities of human life. A measure of America’s success is how its jargon has been adopted by European languages, but there is much more than that to the States’ infiltration into all aspects of modern life. For Debray, the dominance of American civilization is a historical fait accompli. Yet he envisions a sanctuary for the best of Europe modelled on Vienna at the cusp of the twentieth century, where art and literature flowered in the rich soil of a decaying empire. For decades to come, Europe can still offer a rich cultural seedbed. “Some will call it decadence,” writes Debray, “others liberation. Why not both?”

Table Talk

Author: Janet A. Flammang
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252098552
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
The civic virtues of a seat at the table Etiquette books insist that we never discuss politics during a meal. In Table Talk, Janet A. Flammang offers a polite rebuttal, presenting vivid firsthand accounts of people's lives at the table to show how mealtimes can teach us the conversational give-and-take foundational to democracy. Delving into the ground rules about listening, sharing, and respect that we obey when we break bread, Flammang shows how conversations and table activities represent occasions for developing our civil selves. If there are cultural differences over practices--who should speak, what behavior is acceptable, what topics are off limits, how to resolve conflict--our exposure to the making, enforcement, and breaking of these rules offers a daily dose of political awareness and growth. Political table talk provides a forum to practice the conversational skills upon which civil society depends. It also ignites the feelings of respect, trust, and empathy that undergird the idea of a common good that is fundamental to the democratic process.

A Taste for Pop

Author: Cécile Whiting
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780521450041
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
When Pop Art paintings depicted Campbell soup cans or comic-book scenes of teen romance, did they stoop to the level of their mundane sources, or did they instead transform the detritus of consumer culture into high art? In this study, Ccile Whiting declares this issue fundamentally irresolvable and instead takes the question itself, along with the varied answers it has generated, as the object of her analysis. Whiting presents case studies that focus on works by four artists - Tom Wesselmann, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Marisol Escobar - who are closely associated with the Pop Art movement. Throughout her engaging analyses, Whiting unravels the gendered overtones of their cultural manoeuvrings, noting how the connotations of masculinity as attached to the seriousness of high art, and the presumed frivolity and caprice of a feminine world of consumption repositioned cultural frontiers and reformulated the relation between sexes.

Civilization

Author: Niall Ferguson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101548029
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
From the bestselling author of The Ascent of Money and The Square and the Tower “A dazzling history of Western ideas.” —The Economist “Mr. Ferguson tells his story with characteristic verve and an eye for the felicitous phrase.” —Wall Street Journal “[W]ritten with vitality and verve . . . a tour de force.” —Boston Globe Western civilization’s rise to global dominance is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five centuries. How did the West overtake its Eastern rivals? And has the zenith of Western power now passed? Acclaimed historian Niall Ferguson argues that beginning in the fifteenth century, the West developed six powerful new concepts, or “killer applications”—competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and the work ethic—that the Rest lacked, allowing it to surge past all other competitors. Yet now, Ferguson shows how the Rest have downloaded the killer apps the West once monopolized, while the West has literally lost faith in itself. Chronicling the rise and fall of empires alongside clashes (and fusions) of civilizations, Civilization: The West and the Rest recasts world history with force and wit. Boldly argued and teeming with memorable characters, this is Ferguson at his very best.

The Great Books Reader

Author: John Mark Reynolds
Publisher: Baker Books
ISBN: 1441259902
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 656

Book Description
Great Books programs have become increasingly popular among Christian colleges, high schools, and even home schoolers. This one-of-a-kind book is designed for those who do not have the opportunity to attend such a program but are still interested in directly engaging with the Western Canon. It contains substantial excerpts from thirty of the most important books in history, with each excerpt followed by an essay placing the work in historical and Christian context. Readers can learn directly from such authors and thinkers as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, de Tocqueville, Freud, and Chesterton. Selected as one of 2011's Best Books for Preachers by Preaching Magazine

The Price of Civilization

Author: Jeffrey D. Sachs
Publisher: Random House Canada
ISBN: 0307359972
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
For the first time, Jeffrey Sachs, the pre-eminent economist of our times, turns his attention to his homeland, the United States, to reveal the stunning inadequacy of American-style capitalism and to offer a bold and ambitious plan to change it. Jeffrey Sachs has visited more than a hundred countries on five continents, invited to help diagnose and cure seemingly intractable economic problems. Now, in the wake of the worst recession in recent history, Sachs turns his focus on the United States. The complexity of the world economy means that the American form of capitalism, which has been exported around the globe, brought the world to the brink of the precipice--and it will do so again, if measures aren't taken to fix it. This will require not only government action but for US citizens to reach a consensus on their government's role in everyday life and on their basic values--hugely controversial issues in recent years. The scary thing is if they don't, it will affect us all. The good news is that Sachs, in this book, clearly and persuasively leads his readers to an understanding of what the common ground of reform can and should--indeed, must--be.

The Cultural Politics of Food, Taste, and Identity

Author: Steffan Igor Ayora-Diaz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350162744
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 329

Book Description
The Cultural Politics of Food, Taste, and Identity examines the social, cultural, and political processes that shape the experience of taste. The book positions flavor as involving all the senses, and describes the multiple ways in which taste becomes tied to local, translocal, glocal, and cosmopolitan politics of identity. Global case studies are included from Japan, China, India, Belize, Chile, Guatemala, the United States, France, Italy, Poland and Spain. Chapters examine local responses to industrialized food and the heritage industry, and look at how professional culinary practice has become foundational for local identities. The book also discusses the unfolding construction of “local taste” in the context of sociocultural developments, and addresses how cultural political divides are created between meat consumption and vegetarianism, innovation and tradition, heritage and social class, popular food and authenticity, and street and restaurant food. In addition, contributors discuss how different food products-such as kimchi, quinoa, and Soylent-have entered the international market of industrial and heritage foods, connecting different places and shaping taste and political identities.