Chapter Title
Cooking the Books: Jewish Cuisine and the Commodification of Difference
Book Title
Edible Ideologies Representing Food and Meaning
Files
Document Type
Book Chapter
Editors
Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato
Description
Edible Ideologies argues that representations of food—in literature and popular fiction, cookbooks and travel guides, war propaganda, women’s magazines, television and print advertisements—are not just about nourishment or pleasure. Contributors explore how these various modes of representation, reflecting prevailing attitudes and assumptions about food and food practices, function instead to circulate and transgress dominant cultural ideologies. Addressing questions concerning whose interests are served by a particular food practice or habit and what political ends are fulfilled by the historical changes that lead from one practice to another in Western culture, the essays offer a rich historical narrative that moves from the construction of the nineteenth-century English gentleman to the creation of two of today’s iconic figures in food culture, Julia Child and Martha Stewart. Along the way, readers will encounter World War I propaganda, holocaust and Sephardic cookbooks, the Rosenbergs, German tour guides, fast food advertising, food packaging, and chocolate, and will find food for thought on the meanings of everything from camembert to Velveeta, from salads to burgers, and from tikka masala to Campbell’s soup.
ISBN
978-0-7914-7287-3
Publication Date
1-2008
Publisher
State University of New York Press
City
New York City
Keywords
Food, meaning, cuisine, Jewish
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | Food Studies | Social and Behavioral Sciences
NSUWorks Citation
Mason, Eric. (2008). Cooking the Books: Jewish Cuisine and the Commodification of Difference. In Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato (Eds.), Edible Ideologies Representing Food and Meaning (105 - 126).