Meals Matter : : A Radical Economics Through Gastronomy / / Michael Symons.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Columbia University Press Complete eBook-Package 2020
• VerfasserIn: Symons, Michael,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Columbia University Press, , [2020]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Series: Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History
• Physical Description: 1 online resource :; 20 b&w illustrations

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Prologue: Meals Before Money -- 1 It’s Not “the Economy, Stupid,” but More Than Five of Them -- PART 1. INSATIABLE GREED VS. SATIABLE APPETITE -- 2 In Greed They Trust -- 3 Brillat- Savarin’s Quest for Table- Pleasure -- PART 2. LIBERAL ECONOMICS -- 4 Epicurus and the Pleasure of the Stomach -- 5 Cavendish, Hobbes, Locke, and Liberal Political Economy -- 6 The City Sacks Versailles -- 7 Making the Market -- PART 3. THE CAPTURE -- 8 The Dismal Science -- 9 Ludwig von Mises, Neoliberal Godfather -- 10 Rationalization and Corporate Purpose -- 11 The Creation of Homo Economicus -- PART 4. RESTORING ECONOMICS -- 12 Free the Market! (It’s Been Captured by Capitalism) -- 13 Value Families! (Economics Begins at Home) -- 14 Get Political! (Bring Back Banquets) -- Epilogue: “Eat, Drink, and Be Merry” -- Acknowledgments -- Glossary: List of Ingredients -- Notes -- References -- Index