Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Meals Matter: A Radical Economics Through Gastronomy

Meals Matter: A Radical Economics Through Gastronomy

Symons, Michael

Hardcover

Series: Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary H

EconomicsFood WritingGeneral European History

ISBN10: 0231196024
ISBN13: 9780231196024
Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr
Published: Jun 2 2020
Pages: 376
Weight: 1.45
Height: 1.20 Width: 6.20 Depth: 9.10
Language: English

Until the early nineteenth century, political philosophy and economics were dining companions. Both took up fundamental questions of how we should feed one another. But with the rise of corporate capitalism, modern economics lost sight of its primary task and turned away from the complexities of real people's sustenance in favor of the single-minded pursuit of money.

In Meals Matter, Michael Symons returns economics to its roots in the distribution of food and the labor required. Setting the table with vivid descriptions of conviviality, he offers a gastronomic rebuttal to the narrow worldview of mainstream economics. Engaging with a wide variety of thinkers--including Epicurus, Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the gastronomer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, and economic theorists from François Quesnay and Adam Smith through the neoliberals--Symons traces how we went astray and how we can find our way back to a more caring, sustainable way of life. He finds hope for shared table pleasure in institutions like community gardens, street markets, and banquets and in eating fresh, local, and slow food.

An innovative, historically based argument at the intersection of food history and social thought, Meals Matter challenges us to reject the economics of greed in favor of a community-based economics of sharing and gastronomic enjoyment.

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