pearl35 's review for:

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson

4.0

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Another reason to mourn the lost food class, this is a charming study of the rapidly changing way that western people cook and eat. Using person experience and dedicated re-enactors, Wilson tracks down people who explain the knowledge needed to be a good spit roaster and control the ancient technology of open hearth cooking, tracks the taming of dinner knives (Norbert Elias was right--the French took the inherent violence of eating off the table and hid it in the kitchen, along with the pointy objects), tries to explicate the reason Americans don't like to measure by weight (historical lack of kitchen scales?) and follows the microwave revolution. Nicely researched, this has a few jaw-dropping insights, like the literal change in our bite pattern (end-to-end vs. overbite) related to the way we eat with utensils (and that the Chinese got there 1000 years earlier with chopsticks).