A wonderful starting place to think about how to eat ethically.
A collection of essays on the topic of eating ethically, practically, and personally.
Editors Cognard-Black and Goldthwaite, both English professors who have written widely about food, begin with the guideline that there is no one specific diet or method for eating ethically. “Any consideration of ethical eating requires ecological thinking and a close attention to relationships, the environment, and diversity,” they write. The editors divide the book into four sections: Nature and Nurture, Appetite and Restraint, What’s Eating Us, and Our Pasts as Present. Each section opens with an overview of the essays included in that section, and the essays range from two to 25 pages, making the book an excellent choice for casual reading. The editors seek to offer “creative and nuanced food stories that link the culinary imagination to practices of everyday eating,” and they are successful in that endeavor. The essays range from light reading—e.g., “My Children’s First Garden,” in which Michael P. Branch shares his struggles with creating a viable garden—to more focused historical topics, including traditional Indigenous knowledge around food and how the colonization of the Americas directly affected the diet of modern Americans. Vegetarianism and veganism receive ample attention alongside examinations of ethical meat eating and how food remains a vital connection point within our cultures and histories. In a piece titled “Between the Shopping Cart and the Chinese Restaurant,” Adrienne Su explores her often complicated relationship between the joy (and necessity) of cooking at home and the enjoyment of communal dining: “The pandemic revealed that restaurant-going of all kinds can be a social good, keeping people employed, enlivening neighborhoods, and sustaining sources of prepared food for those who can’t cook for themselves.” Other contributors include Nikki Finney, Maureen Stanton, and Aimee Nezhukumatathill.
A wonderful starting place to think about how to eat ethically.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781479821792
Page Count: 352
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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