Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating

Front Cover
Houghton Mifflin, 1980 - Cooking - 279 pages
How people eat reveals to an astonishing degree all of the other qualities of their society. A look at an American fast-food restaurant is as diagnostic of culture as a New Guinea headhunter's shopping list of edible relatives. Beginning with an explanation of what happens to a steak dinner--and to you--when you eat it, Farb constructs a fascinating demonstration of the connections between eating habits and human behavior, explaining, for example, why Bantu society would unravel without beer, why Chinese don't drink milkshakes, and why Moslems and Jews abhor pork.

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Contents

The Biological Baseline
17
The Emerging Human Pattern
40
Eating as Cultural Adaptation
57
Copyright

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