Product Description

Winner of the International Association of Culinary Professions’ Literary Food Writing Award and the Jane Grigson Award in the US, and chosen as a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50836 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-10
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Amazon.ca
Eating is a strange phenomenon, if you think about it: to survive, we must kill and then incorporate other living things into ourselves. It is this basic strangeness with which Margaret Visser's The Rituals of Dinner confronts us. "Eating is aggressive by nature," Visser writes, "the implements required for it could quickly become weapons." Table manners have thus evolved to keep our own rapaciousness in check. Winner of The International Association of Culinary Professionals' Literary Food Writing Award, the Jane Grigson Award, and selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1991), The Rituals of Dinner continues the investigation of "the anthropology of everyday life" that Visser began in her first book, Much Depends on Dinner. She approaches her subject from diverse cultural and historical angles, and the book's organization reflects her own ravenous curiosity. Her travels range from ancient Greece to Papua New Guinea, and from cannibalism to cocktails.

Visser, with a doctorate in classics from the University of Toronto, is a serious scholar. But this best-selling author is also an accomplished stylist. Her greatest gift is for distilling information culled from an astounding range of sources--her bibliography is 30 pages long!--to produce prose that is not only thought-provoking but also highly digestible. --Russell Prather

From Publishers Weekly
Many dining practices--when to start eating, whether to talk or be silent, seating arrangements, the sequence of dishes--vary enormously from one culture to another. Visser elucidates the differences in a continuously involving and surprising banquet of a book, a worthy successor to her Much Depends on Dinner. Table manners, she notes, impose order and regularity on a situation in which people sit in close proximity, armed (with eating utensils) and vulnerable. This observation leads to a discussion of cannibalism, sacrifices, feasts and teaching children etiquette. Visser then takes us through a meal, with sections on toasting, dinner parties, leftovers, bodily control and much else. A smorgasbord of cross-cultural insights, delectably served, this marvelous book instills a keen awareness of the complex social ritual of eating in the company of others.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A belief that food sharing is one characteristic that sets humans apart from animals guides Visser--a professor of classical literature and author of Much Depends on Dinner ( LJ 1/88)--on an exploration of table manners, food taboos, and eating rituals found in cultures throughout the world. Utilizing sources from literature, history, anthropology, and sociology, Visser offers a balanced explanation of how and why rules governing eating arose and why they persist. This explanation is followed by several chapters full of examples of the wide range of eating behaviors found in historical and contemporary cultures. Visser has collected a wealth of information from a varied list of sources, making her book a valuable document. The sheer volume of information and matter-of-fact tone may, however, discourage all but etiquette enthusiasts from reading the book for sheer pleasure.
- Eric Hinsdale, Simmons Coll. Graduate Sch. of Management, Boston
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.