The Gastronomica Reader Book

"Rarefied but unpretentious, each issue is an artfully curated collection of essays, poems, art, and journalistic reportage. . . . Gastronomica's fare never fails to nourish us." —Saveur magazine

"I am so impressed with this journal. It indicates an accuracy and diversity of information and style that will inspire and encourage people to pay attention to what they are eating."—Alice Waters

"Food, even more than sex, is the basis for human relationships, and if Brillat-Savarin's 'Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are' is right, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture will enhance your life and improve your relationships with your family and your friends."—Jacques Pépin

"Gastronomica deserves the food world's attention." —Paul Levy

"A food journal of high standards that takes on substantive food issues."—Patricia Unterman

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Interacting with so many disciplines, Gastronomica will assure a fine intellectual menu and reinvigorate the worlds of food and culture with ever higher standards of scholarship."—Anne Willan

"[One of] my top food favorites from 2008. . . . A delightful study of all things food, even those that touch the world of food in a peripheral way."—The Zest, food blog

Publishers Weekly

Starred Review.

This collection of articles from Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture will feed the curious and the jaded with an eclectic collection of food-related stories, photos and poems that range from the avant-garde to the mildly outrageous to the titillating and the occasionally ridiculous. This multifaceted presentation, graced with provocative illustrations, includes a profile of a famous restaurateur who became Hitler's caterer, an examination of taboos related to cooking apes, the chronicle of a foodie's colonoscopy, a surprisingly engaging essay regarding "The Legacy of Iceland's Herring Oil and Meal Factories," and an investigation of food pornography (a stretch even for the open-minded); poems include odes to a sexy shallot and a talking potato. More conventional articles consider the traditional New York City egg cream ("Somehow the lack of those two ingredients never bothered customers"), drinking cappuccino along the Spice Trail, and television cooking shows ("the illegitimate love child, or even the prostitute, of the real world of gastronomy"). Putting the "soup to nuts" principal to good use, this volume should absorb anyone with an appetite for unconventional food writing. 64 color and b/w illustrations.