Much Depends on Dinner, Margaret Visser
Much Depends on Dinner, Margaret Visser
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
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Much Depends on Dinner
The extraordinary history and mythology, allure and obsessions, perils and taboos, of an ordinary meal

Author: Margaret Visser

Narrator: Suzanne Toren

Unabridged: 14 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 07/18/2008


Synopsis

Best-selling author Margaret Visser holds a doctorate in classics and appears frequently on television and radio shows. Much Depends on Dinner was chosen as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review and Publisher's Weekly. As the subtitle suggests, here she uses the framework of a simple meal to show us how our food has defined who we are and how we live. Dr. Visser begins by showing how corn has shaped the history of man. In further chapters, she considers the economics of salt, the medicinal properties of butter, and offers similarly fascinating information about chicken, lettuce, olive oil and lemon juice. The final chapter ends on a sweet note with ice cream and the nostalgia it creates. As it gathers information from the villages of ancient hunters and the corridors of modern science, Dr. Visser's perceptive book examines food through a wider lens than today's nutritional microscope. It isn't meant to change our eating habits, but it leaves us with a taste for the history and mythology of everyday foods. Narrator Suzanne Toren captures Dr. Visser's enthusiasm for her subject.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Craig

Before it became fashionable to think about what's on your plate, this author wrote a brilliant, extensively researched book in a trope it's as unforgettable as your phone number. Take the most simple meal you can imagine - one composed of 9 ingredients like salt or butter that you never think about......more

Goodreads review by Honor

Some people have sometimes said I think about things too much... Analyze them too much, over-think them, look for so much deeper layers and meanings and cause and effect than there need be in any given thing. I can certainly see the Zen beauty in seeing each thing of and for itself, without looking d......more

Goodreads review by Lynn

It's hard to imagine now how revolutionary books like this were back when Much Depends on Dinner was published in 1986. It was barely conceivable then that someone would write a book, an actual book about something so ordinary as a meal of corn on the cob with butter and salt, chicken, lettuce wit......more

Here is a beguiling concept - let's discuss 9 parts of dinner in great detail! The author, M Visser, obviously put a great deal of elbow grease into this book. There is information upon information. It is trivia on steroids. But it reads that way: an assemblage of interesting notes. Each paragraph is......more