Reading Food: A Culinary History From Shakespeare To Martha Stewart

Tony Soprano's fear of meat has a long history. The simple act of tasting chocolate in the eighteenth century has class and racial overtones. Wall's book will look at a dozen or so foods, implements, and practices to assemble a broad picture of how food and dining have come to mean what they mean today.

Part literary history, part anthropology, part popular culture study, Reading Food is an informative and readable addition to the literature on what we eat.

Wendy Wall is Professor of English at Northwestern, where she has taught since 1995. She earned her PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania. She has written two books and edited a third.