Making Modern Meals: How Americans Cook Today (California Studies in Food and Culture #66)

Making Modern Meals: How Americans Cook Today (California Studies in Food and Culture #66)

Amy B. Trubek
$29.95
Publication Date: October 24th, 2017
Publisher:
University of California Press
ISBN:
9780520289239
Pages:
320
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Description

Home cooking is crucial to our lives, but today we no longer identify it as an obligatory everyday chore. By looking closely at the stories and practices of contemporary American home cooks—witnessing them in the kitchen and at the table—Amy B. Trubek reveals our episodic but also engaged relationship to making meals.
 
Making Modern Meals explores the state of American cooking over the past century and across all its varied practices, whether cooking is considered a chore, a craft, or a creative process. Trubek challenges current assumptions about who cooks, who doesn’t, and what this means for culture, cuisine, and health. She locates, identifies, and discusses the myriad ways Americans cook in the modern age, and in doing so, argues that changes in making our meals—from shopping to cooking to dining—have created new cooks, new cooking categories, and new culinary challenges.

About the Author

Amy B. Trubek is Associate Professor of Nutrition and Food Science at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession and The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir.

Praise for Making Modern Meals: How Americans Cook Today (California Studies in Food and Culture #66)

"Makes the familiar compellingly strange as meals become complex processes of self, other, and culture. Readers in the United States will have little trouble inserting themselves into Trubek's stories, enabling them to consider their own habits of cooking and consuming food.”
— PopMatters

“An excellent introduction to the study of contemporary culinary habits.”
— CHOICE

“An important contribution to the anthropology of food.”
— Library Journal

“This ambitious book opens hallways full of doors for young scholars in food studies to one day walk through. . . . This book eloquently raises many topics worthy of deep and serious discussion.”
— Graduate Association for Food Studies Journal

“Her book makes the familiar compellingly strange as meals become complex processes of self, other, and culture. Readers in the United States will have little trouble inserting themselves into Trubek's stories, enabling them to consider their own habits of cooking and consuming food.”
— PopMatters

“An excellent introduction to the study of contemporary culinary habits.”
— CHOICE

“Insightful and timely. . .Truly another treat from Trubek, providing the reader with a taste of many of the challenges and considerations facing home cooks in the twenty-first century.”
— Gastronomica

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