Rachel Laudan

“Foie gras belongs to the protected cultural and gastronomical heritage of France”, according to French law (French rural code L654-27-1). Hmm.  Go read Michaela DeSoucey’s article on gastronationalism in the prestigious American Sociological Review, an article that uses all the technical tools of sociology to get to the politics underlying this preemptive claim. Here’s her [...]

Silence, deathly silence.  Then the conversation went back to where it had been five minutes before.  What had I said that provoked such a hostile reaction? It was the late 1960s and I was talking an after-lunch walk with old French friends S & G on one of their annual visits to my family in [...]

This is a serious question. Brillat-Savarin, just to remind you, published in 1825 a work on gastronomy called Physiologie du Goût (in English The Physiology of Taste)  self-described as “a lasting foundation for the science of gastronomy.”  It’s been in print ever since, was translated into English by the renowned author M.K. Fisher, and as [...]