Reviews for Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Peri...

The average rating for Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Peri... based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-07-10 00:00:00 Caterina Patania This is a 10-star set of books in one. It takes Mark Kurlansky a whole book to say less about a single food item than Margaret Visser does in a single chapter. Whether it is olive oil or chicken, everything from archeology, sociology, agriculture, medicine, literature, science, marketing even philosophy, religion and mythology as well as food is detailed in an enjoyable, brilliantly-written way. Each chapter deserves 10 stars for the breadth of knowledge it communicates so succinctly and in a well-written, thoroughly enjoyable way. If you like non-fiction, this is wonderful and if you always read fiction but want to try more factual books, try this one, it might excite and enthrall you as much as it did me. _______________ Did you know that in an American supermarket almost every single food item has something to do with corn, that includes the packaging? The exception is fresh fish. America runs on corn. Someone should write a dystopian novel where everything, all grains, all grasses, absolutely everything is normal, except all the corn dies. The book has started off really well, I read Rituals Of Dinner years ago, so when a book by the same author, a cultural and culinary anthropologist and historian popped up, I was delighted.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-03-09 00:00:00 Justin Pinoni Before it became fashionable to think about what's on your plate, this author wrote a brilliant, extensively researched book in a trope it's as unforgettable as your phone number. Take the most simple meal you can imagine - one composed of 9 ingredients like salt or butter that you never think about on their own - and explain in depth each element. Visser uses each ingredient to burrow into its importance to a dizzying number of cultures, to construct a chapter-length world with that ingredient at the epicenter, and to undercover nerdily amazing factoids. Two of every dozen factoids stick with the reader, and this reader found that with so many facts and cultures, it's tough to read more than a page at a time without being overloaded. Still, when information comes as densely packed as the original slang for Westerners in Japan was "butter-stinkers," 1/4 of Detroit sits on top of abandoned salt mines and the reason our parents threw rice at weddings, it's worth reading even a page at a time.