Book review
Review of "The Table Comes First: family, France, and the Meaning of Food" by Adam Gopnik
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars Program,University of California San Francisco,3333 California St, Suite 465, Campus Box 0844, San Francisco, CA, 94143-0844, USA
Flavour 2012, 1:18 doi:10.1186/2044-7248-1-18
Published: 1 October 2012First paragraph (this article has no abstract)
Scholars of flavor and food preferences have shown us that a surprisingly difficult question to answer is, "why do you eat what you eat?" In The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food[1], Adam Gopnik attempts to address this and a similarly vexing question, "why do we care so much about our food?" by tracing the roots of what happens at the dinner table. Written with both everyday eaters and scholars of food in mind, Gopnik interweaves ideas about the development and meanings of taste with the historical and social circumstances around which we make choices about food and evaluate flavors. His compelling narrative strikes an engaging balance between the scholarly and the experiential.
