The Gastronomica Reader - Darra Goldstein
Saveur and Bon Apetit come out looking like the Cosmopolitan of food periodicals alongside Gastronomica's more New Yorker-with-footnotes sensibility. Founded and edited by laurelled cookbook author and Williams College Professor of Russian Darra Goldstein, the glossy quarterly of food and culture eschews how-to-hedonism for a more thoughtful, more penetrating treatment of food and its place in our lives, cultures, and history. With an approachably—rather than pretentiously theorized—academic bent. This collection of features, poems and artwork from the journal's first decade will charm and intrigue you. There are well-considered pieces on everything from patented PB&Js, the Koranic propriety of caviar, pregnant women who snack on clay, Christian dieting crazes in America, and the conflict of genetically modified food aid with food values in Zambia. As one feature writer notes, "food is complicated nourishment that feeds more than the body."
