This article considers the power of food as a vehicle for memory by exploring the ways that food crosses the personal and the collective, the individual and the social. It examines these questions through the lens of certain Easter practices on the island of Kalymnos, Greece, concerning the preparation of lamb. The ovens and pots used to prepare lamb are a marker of Kalymnian identity, but have moved in interesting ways in and out of social practice. By comparing these socially (...) embedded practices with American "junk food" memories, the article suggests some general qualities that make food a useful site for the exploration of the social constitution of memory. (shrink)

The three books under review here represent the recent efflorescence of diverse approaches to a previously neglected topic: the anthropology of cooking. By examining cooking through the lens of biological anthropology and differing cultural anthropological approaches, the books together make a strong case for the centrality of in-depth analysis of cooking to issues of gender, and to social change and evolutionary change. As Lévi-Strauss long ago recognized, this review reaffirms the notion that cooking is "good to think" about many of (...) the topics that preoccupy our contemporary academic studies. (shrink)