Bad Food Britain How A Nation Ruined Its Appetite

Download or read book Bad Food Britain: How A Nation Ruined Its Appetite written by Joanna Blythman and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2013-04-11 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning investigative food journalist, Joanne Blythman turns her attention to the current hot topic – the state of British food.

Download or read book Mapping Appetite written by Pere Gallardo-Torrano and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As recent years have witnessed a strong interest in the cultural representation of the culinary, ranging from analyses of food representation in film and literature to cultural readings of recipes, menus, national cuisines and celebrity chefs, the study of food narratives amidst contemporary consumer culture has become increasingly more important. This book seeks to respond to the challenge by presenting a series of case studies dealing with the representation of food and the culinary in a variety of cultural texts including post-colonial and popular fiction, women’s magazines and food writing. The contributors to the first part of the volume explore the various functions of food in post-colonial writing ranging from Salman Rushdie and Anita Desai to Zadie Smith and Maggie Gee in the context of globalization and multiculturalism. In the second part of the volume the focus is on two genres of popular fiction, the romantic novel and science fiction. While the romantic novels of Joanne Harris, for instance, link food and cooking with female empowerment, in science fiction food is connected with power and technology. The essays in the third part of the book explore the role of food in travel writing, women’s magazines and African American cookery books, showing how issues of gender, nation and race are present in food narratives.

Download or read book Spicing up Britain written by Panikos Panayi and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the cuisines of Europe, Britain’s has long been regarded as the black sheep—kippers, jellied eels, and blood pudding rarely elicit the same fond feelings as chocolate mousse or pasta primavera. Despite these unsavory stereotypes, British cuisine is anything but unremarkable today. Panikos Panayi reveals in this fascinating study that British cuisine has been transformed and enriched by diverse international influences. The last thirty years have seen immigrants flood British shores, but Spicing Up Britain reveals that foreign influences have been infusing British cuisine for the past 150 years. From the arrival of Italian ice cream vendors and German butchers in the nineteenth century to the British curry that permeates dishes today, Panayi chronicles the rich and fascinating social history behind the rise of a truly multicultural cuisine. The author argues that Britons’ eating habits have been reshaped by immigration, globalization, and increased wealth, and he explores how other cultures have woven themselves into British society through the portal of food—whether Anglo-Indian fusion dishes like chicken tikka masala, New British cuisine restaurants, or the popular home-cooked dish of spaghetti bolognese. Panayi reveals how these changes in British cuisine shed light on the role of multiculturalism in the construction of modern British identity: Britain is a diverse nation in which different peoples are united by willingness to sample the foods produced by other ethnic groups—but those ethnic groups are at the same time ghettoized by not moving beyond their own culinary traditions. A comprehensive and engaging investigation, Spicing Up Britain serves up delicious new facets of food in Britain today.

Download or read book The Pleasures and Horrors of Eating written by Marion Gymnich and published by V&R Unipress. This book was released on 2010-09-15 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Browsing through books and TV channels we find people pre-occupied with eating, cooking and competing with chefs. Eating and food in today's media have become a form of entertainment and art. A survey of literary history and culture shows to what extent eating used to be closely related to all areas of human life, to religion, eroticism and even to death.In this volume, early modern ideas of feasting, banqueting and culinary pleasures are juxtaposed with post-18th- and 19th-century concepts in which the intake of food is increasingly subjected to moral, theological and economic reservations. In a wide range of essays, various images, rhetorics and poetics of plenty are not only contrasted with the horrors of gluttony, they are also seen in the context of modern phenomena such as the anorexic body or the gourmandizing bête humaine.It is this vexing binary approach to eating and food which this volume traces within a wide chronological framework and which is at the core not only of literature, art and film, but also of a flourishing popular culture.

Download or read book The Practice of the Meal written by Benedetta Cappellini and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reflecting a growing interest in consumption practices, and particularly relating to food, this cross disciplinary volume brings together diverse perspectives on our (often taken for granted) domestic mealtimes. By unpacking the meal as a set of practices - acquisition, appropriation, appreciation and disposal - it shows the role of the market in such processes by looking at how consumers make sense of marketplace discourses, whether this is how brand discourses influence shopping habits, or how consumers interact with the various spaces of the market. Revealing food consumption through both material and symbolic aspects, and the role that marketplace institutions, discourses and places play in shaping, perpetuating or transforming them, this holistic approach reveals how consumer practices of ‘the meal’, and the attendant meaning-making processes which surround them, are shaped. This wide-ranging collection will be of great interest to a wide range of scholars interested in marketing, consumer behaviour and food studies, as well as the sociology of both families and food.

Download or read book Educated Tastes written by Jeremy Strong and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The old adage ?you are what you eat? has never seemed more true than in this era, when ethics, politics, and the environment figure so prominently in what we ingest and in what we think about it. Then there are connoisseurs, whose approaches to food address ?good taste? and frequently require a language that encompasses cultural and social dimensions as well. From the highs (and lows) of connoisseurship to the frustrations and rewards of a mother encouraging her child to eat, the essays in this volume explore the complex and infinitely varied ways in which food matters to all of us. Educated Tastes is a collection of new essays that examine how taste is learned, developed, and represented. It spans such diverse topics as teaching wine tasting, food in Don Quixote, Soviet cookbooks, cruel foods, and the lambic beers of the Belgian Payottenland. A set of key themes connect these topics: the relationships between taste and place; how our knowledge of food shapes taste experiences; how gustatory discrimination functions as a marker of social difference; and the place of ethical, environmental, and political concerns in debates around the importance and meaning of taste. With essays that address, variously, the connections between food, drink, and music; the place of food in the development of Italian nationhood; and the role of morality in aesthetic judgment, Educated Tastes offers a fresh look at food in history, society, and culture.

Download or read book Dishing It Out written by Robert Appelbaum and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2011-12-20 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the hamburger haven to the temple of gastronomy, the restaurant is a fixture of modern life. But why is that so? What needs has the restaurant come to satisfy, and what needs has it come to impose upon the experience of the modern world? In Dishing It Out, Robert Appelbaum travels around America and Europe and through the annals of literature and history to explore the social meaning of the restaurant—and to discover what we ought to be asking of the restaurant experience today. Since its founding in pre-Revolutionary France, the restaurant has always inspired contradictory feelings and served contradictory purposes. It has stood for a kind of liberation: the embrace of pleasure and sociability for their own sake. But it has also encouraged narcissistic consumerism at the cost of the exploitation of restaurant workers, and the self-deception of restaurant-goers. Drawing on the work of such writers as Grimod de la Reynière, Jean-Paul Sartre, Isak Dinesen and M.F.K. Fisher, and sampling fare from macaroni cheese in workaday London to oysters and sausages in seaside France, Appelbaum argues that though restaurants are inherently problematic as social institutions, they are characteristic of who and what we are. They are expressions of what we need as human beings. And for that reason, though they contribute to inequality they can also be used to promote the interests of cultural democracy. A unique rethinking of the restaurant experience, at once entertaining and learned, Dishing it Out is an important contribution to our knowledge of food, literature, history and society.