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Title: The Culinary Imagination

Subtitle: From Myth to Modernity

Author: Sandra M. Gilbert

Narrator: Suzanne Toren

Format: Unabridged

Length: 15 hrs and 33 mins

Language: English

Release date: 08-25-14

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 3 votes

Genres: History, World

Publisher's Summary:

From the recipe novel to the celebrity chef, renowned scholar Sandra M. Gilbert explores the poetics and politics of food. In this stunning and important work, the prominent critic, poet, and memoirist Sandra M. Gilbert explores our relationship with food and eating through discussions of literature, art, and popular culture. Focusing on contemporary practices, The Culinary Imagination traces the social, aesthetic, and political history of food from myth to modernity, from ancient sources to our current wave of food mania.

What does it mean to transform raw stuff into cooked dishes, which then become part of our own bodies; to savor festive meals yet resolve to renounce gluttony; to act as predators where in another life we might have become prey? Do the rituals of the kitchen have different meanings for men and women, for professional chefs and home cooks? Why, today, do so many of us turn so passionately toward table topics, on the page, online, and on screen? What are the philosophical implications of the food chain on which we all find ourselves?

In The Culinary Imagination, Gilbert addresses these powerful questions through meditations on myths and memoirs, childrens books, novels, poems, food blogs, paintings, TV shows, and movies. Discussing figures from Rex Stout to Julia Child and Andy Warhol, from M. F. K. Fisher and Sylvia Plath to Alice Waters and Peter Singer, she analyzes the politics and poetics of our daily bread, investigating our complex self-definitions as producers, consumers, and connoisseurs of food. The result is an ambitious, lively, and learned examination of the ways in which our cultures artists have represented food across a range of genres.

Members Reviews:

Tarragon for the mind: a poet who muses on what we've been doing all along at dinner and in the arts

What an ambitious work. It pulls literary references to culinary arts and distills some really big insights. I'd highly recommend for those folks who read Reichl or Pollock and want to know on whose shoulders they stand on. Personally, I like the beginning part of the book than the final chapters. Because I'm an artist with a penchant for food. But that's just the point. No matter where you enter Sandra's universe of thought, expect to lift out key points that will reshape your thinking. And of course poetically written prose.

The Well-Fed Muse

There was no "food memoir" section in the bookstores until recently. Cookbooks used to be how-to manuals and it was unusual to read them for entertainment until not long ago. The only programs about preparing food on TV before Julia Child's French Chef were intended to inform, not to entertain. What changed?

In The Culinary Imagination, Sandra Gilbert suggests that maybe things haven't really changed all that much, after all. She looks at food-themed literature, memoirs, television and film, poetry, even paintings and sculpture from classical times to the present. It's a pretty broad topic, and The Culinary Imagination acts as a survey, introducing us to examples of food-themed cultural works. Gilbert adds criticism and opinion that spices it all up. You can compare notes with her if you're familiar with the show/book/poem, and if you aren't familiar with the work under discussion, it's hard to resist stopping to find a copy immediately.