Eating is the most common way to celebrate in our culture, the most visible way to indulge ourselves. And yet few things have such power over our lives--it controls us as consumers, as social animals, as guilty creatures of appetite. Through a lively mixture of the history of eating, memoir, sociology, and family recipes, Tisdale explores our public and private attitudes about and relationships with food, drawing a rich portrait of the many forces behind our American appetite and demystifying the everyday miracle of eating.