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What defines cooking as cooking, and why does cooking matter to the understanding of society, cultural change and everyday life? This book explores these questions by proposing a new theory of the meaning of cooking as a willingness to put oneself and one’s meals at risk on a daily basis. Richly illustrated with examples from the author’s anthropology fieldwork in Greece, Bigger Fish to Fry proposes a new approach to the meaning of cooking and how the study of cooking can reshape our understanding of social processes more generally.
“With writing that is highly readable, clear, and well-paced, this book will appeal to students and scholars alike, especially those studying food and cooking, Greece, and risk, and is an exceptional example of studying food practices for their theoretical bounty.” • Food, Culture & Society
“It is a highly readable and conceptually rich book drawing on material from ethnographic work in Kalymnos, Greece, and popular culture in the USA. It beautifully wedges current discussions about cooking into the stream of scholarly discussion in Cultural Anthropology and Cultural Sociology.” • Krishnendu Ray, New York University
“This book constitutes a moment in which the systematic and long-standing knowledge of [the author's] field, and the very rewarding trajectory of fieldwork over the years, has now reached a point when they can produce anthropological knowledge of another level.” • Vassiliki Yiakoumaki, University of Thessaly, Greece
David E. Sutton has been teaching at the department of Anthropology, Southern Illinois University Since 1999. He has been a Full Professor since 2011. Key Publications include Secrets from the Greek Kitchen (California Series in Food and Culture, 2014), and Remembrance of Repasts (Berg, Materializing Culture Series, 2001).
List of Figures
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: In the Dangerous Kitchen
Chapter 1. How People Cook, While Thinking, for Example
Chapter 2. “That’s Not Cooking!” Human Creativity or Mechanical Reproduction?
Chapter 3. “To Steal a Bad Hour from Death.” Subjective Risk and Contingent Temporalities in the Greek Kitchen
Conclusion: Take the Risk
References
Index