Category: Bite Club

Special series on cookbooks

Farm Girl Meets European Living

Farm Girl Meets European Living

By Michaela D.E. Meyer I grew up in a small farm community in Nebraska. Our food intake relied largely on what our farm (or neighbor’s farms) produced – beef, pork, corn, soybeans. Farming culture followed a very specific food rhythm – load up as much caloric intake as possible in the morning, work all day in the fields, and then power load again in the evening at dinner. I wasn’t the biggest fan of that traditional “farm-to-table” schedule. I tend {+}

Rembetika Food

Rembetika Food

By Angela Glaros I have been reading cookbooks since childhood (along with Heloise’s Household Hints, another leisure reading genre).  Much later, when I began studying anthropology, cooking and keeping house seemed like essential areas of ethnographic focus, regardless of the purported topic of one’s study. While I did my dissertation fieldwork on a small Greek island, it was my mother who had unwittingly first exposed me to ethnographic modes of inquiry back in 1981, on our first visit with our {+}

Discovering Tampa in my Kitchen

Discovering Tampa in my Kitchen

By Daniel Miller Of all the bad habits I have passed on to my daughter, reading at the dinner table is the one I am least ashamed of.  It puts a damper on conversation, but it ensures the appropriate caloric intake, and so it goes.  Her end of the table is stacked with Harry Potter novels, Calvin and Hobbes, and Raina Telgemeier books.  My end of the table is stacked with cookbooks.  It’s been a long running joke in my {+}

Memories of Playing with Food in a West Coast Kitchen

Memories of Playing with Food in a West Coast Kitchen

by Jennifer Shutek Every religion has its origin myths and sacred texts; so, too, does my faith in the goodness of the kitchen. While I grew up in a family in which communal eating around a dining table was a daily event, my own involvement in food preparation began in earnest with restaurant owner Audrey Alsterburg and former head chef Wanda Urbanowicz’s Rebar: Modern Food Cookbook. While it was not my first encounter with cookbookery and cooking, Rebar created a {+}

Anthropology Bite Club

Anthropology Bite Club

  The first rule of Bite Club is that we’re going to talk about cookbooks. The second rule of Bite Club is I need some of ya’ll to help me out talking about cookbooks. … Do you read cookbooks and think they are, in fact, practical ethnography?? When you look at a recipe do you see history and memory? Evolution and ecology? Technology? Gift exchange? Social roles? Current events? Is there a favorite cookbook that would be of interest to {+}