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Food History: A Primary Source Reader
Ken Albala
With the proliferation of food history courses and avid interest among scholars and the general public, the need for a solid comprehensive collection of key primary texts about food of the past is urgent.
This collection spans the globe from classical antiquity to the present, offering substantive selections from cookbooks, fiction, gastronomic and dietary treatises and a wide range of food writing. Offering a solid introduction to each period with extensive commentary and suggestions for interpretive strategies, this reader provides extracts undigested, for the student who needs immediate and direct contact with the ideas of the past.
Readings illustrate the various ways religion, politics, social structure, health and agricultural policy shaped what people ate in the past and offer instructive ways to think about our own food systems and how they have been shaped by historical forces.
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From Famine to Fast Food: Nutrition, Diet and Concepts of Health Around the World
Ken Albala
The foods eaten by a nation's population play a key role in shaping the health of that society. This book presents country-specific information on how diet, food security, and concepts of health critically impact the well-being of the world's population.
A country's food culture and eating habits directly impact the health and well-being of its citizens. Economic factors contribute to problems such as obesity and malnourishment. This book examines how diet affects health in countries around the world, discussing how the availability of food and the types of foods eaten influence numerous health factors and are tied to the prevalence of "lifestyle" diseases. Readers will discover the importance of diet and food culture in determining human health as well as make connections and notice larger trends within multicultural, international contexts.
An ideal aid for high school and college students in completing research and writing assignments, this book supplies detailed diet- and health-related information about most major countries and regions in a single source. Each country profile will also include a convenient fact box with statistical information such as life expectancy, average caloric intake, and other health indicators.
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Nuts: A Global History
Ken Albala
From almonds and pecans to pistachios, cashews, and macadamias, nuts are as basic as food gets—just pop them out of the shell and into your mouth. The original health food, the vitamin-packed nut is now used industrially, in confectionary, and in all sorts of cooking. The first book to tell the full story of how nuts came to be in almost everything, Nuts takes readers on a gastronomic, botanical, and cultural tour of the world.
Tracking these fruits and seeds through cultivation, harvesting, processing, and consumption—or non-consumption, in the case of those with nut allergies—award-winning food writer Ken Albala provides a fascinating account on how they have been cooked, prepared, and exploited. He reveals the social and cultural meaning of nuts during various periods in history, while also immersing us in their modern uses. Packing scrumptious recipes, surprising facts, and fascinating nuggets inside its hardcover shell, this entertaining and informative book will delight lovers of almonds, hazelnuts, chestnuts, and more.
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Stockton’s Ethnic Communities and the Early Community Cookbooks
Ken Albala
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Stockton was a bustling post gold-rush era city eager to reinvent itself by fostering business and industry, which meant making the city hospitable to workers from many different backgrounds. With a remarkable legacy of cultural diversity, it is no surprise that the city has always had markets and restaurants cater-ing to a wide range of peoples from around the world: Hispanic, Asian, African, and European, as it does to this day. This period also witnessed a proliferation of community cookbooks from churches, the synagogue, and public schools. This paper will describe how ordinary people negotiated the gastronomic landscape either by incorporating and adapting foods from their multi-ethnic neighbors or by ignoring them. Since these were recipes chosen by citizens, they reflect to some extent the dishes they actually ate, or at least, when signed, designate those foods they wanted their neighbors to think they were able to prepare. Exactly what these cookbooks say from a social, political, religious, and ethnographic vantage point will be explored as an illustration of how the city experienced growing pains in accepting diversity through its food. The books themselves will also be discussed as historic artifacts, as some are cheaply made, others are quite elegant, though all were actually published and printed in Stockton.
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The Impact of the Reformation on Cuisine and Food Cultures in the Low Countries
Ken Albala
While the role of Christian fasting regulations on the cuisine of the Middle Ages are relatively well known, particularly in the elaboration of meals centered around fish and vegetables as well as dairy substitutes such as almond milk, the way these regulations were altered in the Reformation era is less well known. Starting with the various dispensations for meat eating, including most notoriously that granted to Erasmus of Rotterdam, and continuing with the wholesale abandonment of calendrical fasts in the north, this paper will explore how gastronomic stereotypes differentiating between the Protestant north and Catholic south were constructed in the culinary literature. Theological tracts and dietary literature of the era will provide additional evidence for the gastronomic divisions which were not yet so clear cut or apparent in the first century of the Reformation. Yet in the end, fasting played an important part not only in liturgical distinctions, but in culinary choices and the overall cultural differences centered on food. The works of Ludovicus Nonnius in the Spanish Netherlands (Ichthyophagia) made a rational argument for maintaining fish days on the basis of health, while Reformed theologians such as Johannes Dallaeus whose works on fasting were published in Deventer, argued for a complete biblical reinterpretation of communal food regulations. Both authors reveal the ways that ideas about penitence and fasting were played out in cooking of this period.
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Toward a Historical Dialectic of Culinary Styles
Ken Albala
Culinary styles through history follow a recurring and predictable pattern shifting from complexity to simplicity and then back again. Each new aesthetic nonetheless incorporates elements, either ingredients, techniques or modes of service, from its immediate predecessor, such that the process is more dialectical than strictly oppositional. This article provides numerous concrete examples drawn from cookbooks and gastronomic literature which illustrate this complex pattern of evolution, driven largely by the process of social emulation though also influenced by economic trends, trade and the business of selling food.
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