Food and Love: A Cultural History of East and West

Jack Goody is a thinker who enjoys subverting neat simplifications and rigid preconceptions. A leading anthropologist and comparative sociologist, he is perhaps best known for his acclaimed critique of crude historical distinctions between 'West' and 'East'--and overblown claims for the uniqueness of the West. In Food and Love, Goody pursues his argument into the sphere of culture. Starting with a sustained discussion of the context of such debates in the thought of classic theorists such as Marx, as well as contemporary historical and sociological notions of modernisation, Goody goes on to survey phenomena as diverse and fascinating as the uniqueness of the European family, the development of romantic love, the evolution of national and regional cuisine's, the globalisation of Chinese food, and the histories of various taboos on certain types of food and drink, at all times effortlessly ranging from Europe to Asia and to Africa. In a final bracing section challenging dominant relativist conceptions, Goody considers the difficulties and complexities of cross-cultural and comparative analysis, and he picks apart the doubts involved in the very process of representation and symbolic communication. Throughout the book, Goody demonstrates that the ethnocentricity of much of Western scholarship has distorted not only the comprehension of the East but also developments in Europe's past and present.