Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (Materializing Culture) Book

Proust's famous madeleine captures the power of food to evoke some of our deepest memories. Why does food hold such power? What does the growing commodification and globalization of food mean for our capacity to store the past in our meals-in the smell of olive oil or the taste of a fresh-cut fig?

This book offers a theoretical account of the interrelationship of culture, food and memory. The Greek island of Kalymnos-where Islanders claim to remember meals long past-provides the main setting for these issues, as well as comparative materials drawn from England and the United States. Cultural practices of feasting and fasting, global flows of food as both gifts and commodities, the rise of processed food and the relationship of orally transmitted recipes to the vast market in specialty cookbooks tie traditional anthropological mainstays such as ritual, exchange and death to more current concerns with structure and history, cognition and the "anthropology of the senses."