Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Meal

Despite minute research, an original approach and great enthusiasm on behalf of the author "Much depends on dinner" suffers from lack of good editing. Instead of clearly separating history, mythology, eating customs and modern production technique it all gets mushed together into an indigestible porridge. I only made it through five chapters before abandoning the book.

A book of essays about our relationship to food, in Western culture. Visser was a classical scholar, and thus extrapolated ideas about common behaviours, and what things like the foods assembled for a single meal could tell people about their relationship to the planet and to other people. It is a contact with a very civilized mind, and a marvelous discussion!

When Visser wrote this book, it was one of the very first ‘food history’ books, spawning a new genre. It’s a very well researched book, and goes into great detail.

Vissar’s format is to detail the history of the components of one simple dinner- buttered and salted corn on the cob, a roast chicken with rice on the side, a green salad with olive oil and lemon juice dressing, and ice cream. Each piece of the dinner gets it’s own chapter, and it’s rather surprising how long the chapters are, because none of these items has a history that is uncomplicated.

To get to the history of butter (or ice cream), one must have the history of milk, the history of cows. This leads to the migrations of the cow keeping people. We follow the show more history of butter up to the age of margarine, and the history of said margarine, and the battle between the manufacturers of butter and of margarine. And the unholy things they do to both.

It was a fascinating read to me. I would never have thought that it would have taken over 300 pages to cover the history of 9 food items. I would love to see an updated version- in 23 years, a lot have things have happened in the food world. She delves deeply and disapprovingly into the things big agribusiness was doing in ’86; I’m sure she’s horrified now with GM foods and the like. show less

A brilliant, unusual look at where food REALLY comes from, why we eat what we eat and what we think about it.

Well done, this book was my first real introduction to food history.