Eating Culture An Anthropological Guide to Food by Gillian Crowther

Eating Culture An Anthropological Guide to Food by Gillian Crowther published by University of Toronto Press reached the second edition recently.

Splendidly illustrated, this superb book is mainly an anthropological cultural guide, that I know you will find truly fascinating; a trip of man through food and its most profound meaning.

We are what we it; what we eat define us; nothing is more interconnected with us than food.
Why?
Maybe because eating can't be avoided and the place where we live, the cultural traditions and foods that accompany us during our existence, speak for us, for our community and our way of living and our way of life.

Men are omnivorous and this one is a fact.
What I didn't know is that the fact that we are bipedalist, caused not just a change of perspective also in terms of research of food (and there, I was) but also a biggest dispersion of energy.
Men in fact learned how to hunting and procure food for themselves and their families with different systems, and with a best geniality than not how our progenitors did.

But what to eat and how, when, where? And: do we eat well?

Prohibitions are part of religion. I remember our jewish friend; he asked us of avoid any kind of pork meat because of religious respect; chinese, as remarked in this book eats dogs meat with normality; to the western population it would mean a horror.

Americans for example don't tend of eating rabbits, or pigeon's meat (for what some friends told me; although of course they can learn).

But how much food can interact with religion?
We have seen the respect brought by Jewish to religion, but another great and spiritual land loves to do the same: it is India.

There is a profound relationship between spiritual and physical health passing through food. "You are what you eat and You eat what you are" is their main thought about the strict relationship existing between food and man.

In a sacred text  it's written: "Without a proper diet, medicines are of no use: with a proper diet, medicines are unnecessary."
For Ayurvedic medicine diet means also the harmonic balance between body, mind and spirit.

Sure diets are many and the most diversified. Some of them can also be "addressed" by politicians for promoting the food of the country where they live in, Patriotically.

Diets can let us introduce "distant" foods, that in the past we didn't know, from spices to fruits, that reached us recently and that are experiencing a lot of success.
Sure the most devastating diet has been the fast food one.
Could we call it a diet? Yes but also an habit.
A wrong one, and in this book of course reported the problems that a massively use and abuse of this habit or diet, can brings with the time.


Man with the time learned, of course at various altitude and with the cultural, social, environmentalists differences that there are to build his own cultural, social community; a cultural and social community that would have passed through food seen as the most important passport and identity.
The author speaks largely of a little community in Alaska where they are big consumers of salmon; to them eating salmon is not just introducing a fish, but salmon is who they are as social entity and identity.

With the time man settled down in various areas of the Planet discovering an agricultural role, and giving space to pastoralism as well.

In recent centuries man discovered also how to chemically fertilize our lands. Who was the inventor of fertilizers?
A German chemist called Justus von Liebig.
He discovered the chemical composition of soil and so he started to add new substances for producing more.
We are in the modern age; the one based on an agriculture made by fertilizers and speaking about animals, mass production. Although the romantic farm still exists, there are also new realities in grade to give to consumers a lot of meal at a good price.

Not only: lately we have seen the arrival of GMO on our tables.

In the past there was but still there is, the market where people tended to buying the most of it, food included, from spices, to fruit.
These places are not completely replaced by supermarkets, but of course, recently we have seen an exponential growth of them as well.

Ad advice giving in this book? Read labels before to buying food that you will put industrial food on your table.

Agriculture is a sector always more exported or imported. We search for exotic food and we export our own fruits and cheese and whatever it is possible to imagine.
Cooking means being social, and as you will see it will be largely treated in the book.

After food what is there? The memory of it and often the memory of it passes through cookbooks of every possible sorta. Some recipes aggregated in a cookbook remarks the identity of some typical food of a certain corner of the world.
In this book we see a smiling Italian-Canadian lady with a copy of the Artusi cook book the Bible of the italian cuisine.

Often recipes are also passed by mother to daughter but also in a contest of community when there is a situation of publicly cook.

An important section of the book is about commensality.
I found captivating  Eating Out and Gastronomy; our modalities of eating food when we are outside. Street-food, pizzas, but also eating sitting down.

Now more than in any other eras we think globally acting locally, and eating "internationally".

Eating means as also remind us the author ethicism; a person could find frustration of adding foods available for us and considered chic when the local poor population where this food is cultivated can't eat it.

Eating doesn't pass just from our mouth but also our heart and consciousness.

Absolutely beautiful and wonderful book; plenty of curiosities, you'll understand everything  about food, its own history and at the same time the story of Man, his relationship with lands, sea, animals because of...food and what food meant for many cultures sometimes very different from our one.

Highly recommended.

I thank  University of Toronto Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori