Reviews for Cook'n To Keep Him: Make Your Relationship Sweeter, Passionate And More Delicious

The average rating for Cook'n To Keep Him: Make Your Relationship Sweeter, Passionate And More Delicious based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-03-22 00:00:00 Frank Lee On the good side this book is an excellent introduction to cultural studies theory and theorists (although it is perhaps not as good a defense as the author hope it to be). It is very clearly written (although with some poor editing in places), and its structuring reflects a very well organized and systematic approach to food. Unfortunately it is not at all what I was looking for. Against the authors insistence of paying attention to the mundane and everyday, they themselves reduce all food process to an interaction of class, nation, and gender, and in doing so create the impression that the only reason tastes are as they are is because of class struggle. For them, food for foods sake, can only be reflective of the middle-class even if it is spoken from a working-class person (like myself) - for them, I am an example of someone duped by the idea of social-mobility and am trying to raise my attitudes and tastes above those of my class even if I don't give a fuck what most people think about food. To reiterate then, for the authors all impressions of food are reducible to class or gender discourses. Thus someone born with a palate that has taste-buds different from others is not really a reason tastes can be relative but rather will respect that that persons tastes will be finally shaped by class and nation (which is bullshit). This said, the greatest failing with the book is that in reducing all discourse to class and gender, moral issues such as industrial farming, GMOs, waste management, animal rights, and (neo)colonialism are not moral in the sense that they have an imperative on all persons but is rather just a class discourse shaping identity and not a human problem. Thus the authors reductionism is their greatest theoretic flaw.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-02-21 00:00:00 John Frisbee Another excellent general text for anyone interested in how we think about food. In 200 fast-paced pages, the authors lay out several wide-ranging aspects of food (eating in, eating out, food writing, anthropology of eating, etc) and discuss how each can be approached through cultural studies.