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Food Cultures of the World Encyclopedia
Ken Albala
Going out for Ethiopian, Argentine, or Malaysian food—or some other international cuisine—may be all the rage these days, but understanding the world's food cultures goes far beyond sampling the fare of the latest "exotic" restaurant. For example, learning the history behind the eating of tahricht (oven-baked sheep offal) among the Berber peoples of northern Africa, or how an average family in the Philippines shops for food, or why Brazilian chefs are focusing more than ever on using culturally important ingredients—all of these are part of understanding global food cultures.
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Shakespeare’s Culinary Aesthetic
Ken Albala
While much attention has been paid to the culinary and dietary metaphors in Shakespeare’s works, the culinary aesthetic with which he would have been familiar is less well known. In other words, what types of foods would a man of Shakespeare’s social standing and profession have eaten in the late 16th and early 17th century? How did the flavor profiles, ingredients and cooking techniques influence his frame of mind and what repertoire of dishes would he have been able to draw from when thinking about food? This paper will examine Tudor and Stuart cuisine. I will argue that the same aesthetic preoccupation with variety, polyphony, surprises and ingenious conceits dominate in drama and cuisine, without however abandoning a certain fundamental straight-forwardness in regard to materials or ingredients. That is, when conjuring metaphors that directly relate to food or not, it was a distinctly Tudor and Stuart approach to art in general, largely influenced by the arts of the table, that steered Shakespeare toward the aesthetic choices he ultimately made.
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The Demise of Home Cooking
Ken Albala
Is the current perception of culinary de-skilling borne out by facts? Did people in the past cook more, and is the food industry to blame for this situation?
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Why We Don't Cook Anymore
Ken Albala
Ken Albala is Professor of History at the University of the Pacific. He is the author or editor of 14 books on food including Eating Right in the Renaissance, Food in Early Modern Europe, Cooking in Europe 1250-1650, The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe, Beans: A History (winner of the 2008 International Association of Culinary Professionals Jane Grigson Award), and Pancake. He has also co-edited two works, The Business of Food and Human Cuisine, and two other edited collections are forthcoming this fall: Food and Faith and A Cultural History of Food: The Renaissance. Albala was also editor of three food series for Greenwood Press with 30 volumes in print and his 4-volume Food Cultures of the World Encyclopedia was just published this summer. Albala is also co-editor of the journal Food Culture and Society and general editor of the new series AltaMira Studies in Food and Gastronomy, for which he has written a textbook entitled Three World Cuisines: Italy, China, Mexico which will appear in the spring of 2012. He is currently researching a history of theological controversies surrounding fasting in the Reformation Era, and has co-authored a cookbook for Penguin /Perigee entitled The Lost Art of Real Cooking, the sequel of which will appear next year and is entitled The Lost Arts of Hearth and Home.
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Food and Faith in Christian Culture
Ken Albala and Trudy Eden
Without a uniform dietary code, Christians around the world used food in strikingly different ways, developing widely divergent practices that spread, nurtured, and strengthened their religious beliefs and communities. Featuring never-before published essays, this anthology follows the intersection of food and faith from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century, charting the complex relationship among religious eating habits and politics, culture, and social structure.
Theoretically rich and full of engaging portraits, essays consider the rise of food buying and consumerism in the fourteenth century, the Reformation ideology of fasting and its resulting sanctions against sumptuous eating, the gender and racial politics of sacramental food production in colonial America, and the struggle to define "enlightened" Lenten dietary restrictions in early modern France. Essays on the nineteenth century explore the religious implications of wheat growing and breadmaking among New Zealand's Maori population and the revival of the Agape meal, or love feast, among American brethren in Christ Church. Twentieth-century topics include the metaphysical significance of vegetarianism, the function of diet in Greek Orthodoxy, American Christian weight loss programs, and the practice of silent eating rituals among English Benedictine monks. Two introductory essays detail the key themes tying these essays together and survey food's role in developing and disseminating the teachings of Christianity, not to mention providing a tangible experience of faith.
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