Why Food Matters

By: Paul Freedman

Narrated by: Jack de Golia

An award-winning historian makes the case for food’s cultural importance, stressing its crucial role throughout human history.

Why does food matter? Historically, food has not always been considered a serious subject on par with, for instance, a performance art like opera or a humanities discipline like philosophy. Necessity, ubiquity, and repetition contribute to the apparent banality of food, but these attributes don’t capture food’s emotional and cultural range, from the quotidian to the exquisite.

In this short passionate audiobook, Paul Freedman makes the case for food’s vital importance, stressing its crucial role in the evolution of human identity and human civilizations. Freedman presents a highly enjoyable and illuminating account of food’s unique role in our lives, a way of expressing community and celebration, but also divisive with regard to race, cultural difference, gender, and geography. This wide-ranging book will be a must-listen for food lovers and all those interested in how cultures and identities are formed and maintained.

©2021 Paul Freedman (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing

Interesting...but

the narration drove me up the wall. i can accept differences between UK and US pronunciation but when so much of the book used French (being the language of gastronomy) I was completely lost even when he related restaurants I have actually eaten in!!! Worth and Aubible plus listen but thank heavens i hadn't spent a credit on this interesting book.

Unsatisfying

Like a small buffet that tries to cover the main food groups, the book touches on some interesting issues but doesn’t really bring them together in a coherent way.

Sweeping and important book on Food, politics and sustainability

The book packs so much in a succinct way. It covers several centuries, genres, history and the future. It make great analogies from popular film culture, to Dante and the current situation with COVID, climate change, GMO’s and alternative meats.

It is a fascinating and important book that is very enjoyable.

Academic discourse on food meets everyday history

It’s clear that Freedman is trained as a scholar, the first chapter certainly reads like an academic defense of a position that the listener might have already bought into (that food and its impact on people and culture is worth thoughtful research and questioning). If I were Freedman’s editor, I might have asked him who is the intended audience here. (Which is why I just can’t give it 5/5 on its “story.” The true narrative nature of this history happens later!). There were moments in the opening where it oddly reminded me of reading “In Defense of Poesy,” but the rest of the book makes up for some initial “Ivory Tower” leanings.

The main chapters of the book cover areas like social class, religion, taste, gender, race, and the environmental impact of ever-evolving agricultural techniques.

Why Food Matters offers a great survey of how wide food’s cultural impact has been. Freedman touches on ancient Judeo-Christian context and Scripture references to the connection of medieval feasts and spices with eventual colonialism to how exactly salads were seen as unmanly (looking at you, 19thC cult of domesticity!) to the nitty-gritty of how enslaved people developed famous American cuisine by referencing the work of Michael Twitty.

If you’re a fan of authors like Bee Wilson, this book would probably be a great fit. If you love seeing how our cooking and dining habits of today find their sources in history, this is definitely worth a listen.

Just maybe skip past that first chapter or so if you’re already on board with the premise!

Boring

I still don’t know why it matters. It was like random information about food history.