CULA: Culinary Arts: Food & Culture

The food we enjoy while celebrating the joining of life partners helps bring us together, no matter what our differences. In this culinary history of wedding feasts, author Claire Stewart examines the various food customs associated with weddings around the world.

What's for dinner? Not just in America, but around the world? And how is it cooked, what's the historical significance of that food, how is it served and consumed, and who gets to clean up? This book provides fascinating insight into how dinner is defined in a variety of countries.

In this book, a Southern hostess shares the secrets of throwing the proper Southern funeral in this compilation of humor and recipes that answers such essential questions as: Can you be properly buried without tomato aspic?

Ranging from the eating habits of our prehistoric ancestors to food-related policy issues we face today, this work covers the full spectrum of foods that have been hunted, gathered, cultivated, and domesticated; their nutritional makeup and uses; and their impact on cultures and demography.

This series presents an authoritative survey from ancient times to the present. The set of six volumes covers nearly 3,000 years of food and its physical, spiritual, social, and cultural dimensions.

This book deconstructs and compares the foodways of people of African descent throughout the Americas, interprets the health legacies of Black culinary traditions, and explains the concept of soul itself, revealing soul food to be an amalgamation of West and Central African social and cultural influences, as well as the adaptations Blacks made to the conditions of slavery and freedom in the Americas. Sampling from travel accounts, periodicals, government reports on food and diet, and interviews with more than 30 people born before 1945, Opie reconstructs an interrelated history of Moorish influence on the Iberian Peninsula, the African slave trade, slavery in the Americas, the emergence of Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements.

While undeniably a "melting pot" of different cultures and cuisines, America's food habits have been shaped as much by technological innovations and industrial progress as by the intermingling and mixture of ethnic cultures. By studying what Americans have been eating since the colonial era, we are enlightened to the conflicting ways in which Americans have chosen to define themselves, their culture, their beliefs, and the changes those definitions have undergone over time.

This book draws on the Torah, the Talmud, and contemporary writings to explain the origins and developments of Jewish dietary traditions, while identifying kosher and non-kosher foods, and sharing instructions for creating a kosher kitchen.

The 27 essays in this book are organized into five basic sections: historiography and disciplinary approaches, as well as the production, circulation, and consumption of food.

Many of the foods we eat every day are unique to the regions of the United States in which we live. Some dishes popular in one region may even be unheard of in another region. This fascinating encyclopedia examines more than 100 foods that are unique to the United States, as well as dishes found only in specific American regions and individual states. Readers will enjoy the details on how each food is prepared and eaten, and insights into why and how each food is celebrated in American culture.

In this book, neuroscientist Rachel Herz examines the sensory, psychological, neuroscientific, and physiological factors that influence our eating habits. The book uncovers the fascinating and surprising facts that influence food consumption, such as why bringing reusable bags to the grocery store encourages us to buy more treats; how our beliefs can affect how many calories we burn; why television influences how much we eat; and how what we see and hear changes how food tastes. The author presents our relationship to food as a complicated recipe, whose ingredients -- taste, personality, and emotions -- combine to make eating a potent and pleasurable experience.

Originating in Mesoamerica 9,000 years ago, corn (or maize) now grows in 160 countries. In this book, author Michael Owen Jones traces the transportation of corn to the Old World by Christopher Columbus, and the rapid distribution throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia that followed. He describes many of the remarkable culinary uses of corn, from the Chilean savory pie pastel de choclo and Japanese corn soup, to Mexican tamales and the South African cracked hominy dish umngqusho. While Jones addresses controversies surrounding maize, he also writes about the many ways corn is celebrated.

Examines food in relationship to nutrition, world health issues, agriculture, environmental concerns, current events and political decision-making.

Thousands of entries provide coverage on every possible food, its history, cultural significance, and culinary usage.

When we eat, we eat the world: taking something from outside and making it part of us. But what does it taste of? Can we develop our taste? In this book, author Sarah Worth argues that taste is a sense that needs educating, for the real pleasures of eating only come with an understanding of what one really likes. From taste as an abstract concept to real examples of food, she explores how we can learn about and develop our sense of taste through themes ranging from pleasure, authenticity and food fraud, to visual images, recipes and food writing.