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LOAVES & WISHES:WRITERS WRITING ON FOOD
To mark Oxfam's 50th anniversary, Virago and Oxfam present an anthology of international writers on food, with contributions from, among others, Maeve Binchy, Germaine Greer, Margaret Drabble, Attia Hosain and Maxine Hong Kingston. The 20 well-known women writers explore the nuances of love, nurturing, festivities, family and social bonds that people associate with growing, cooking and eating food through a mixture of autobiography, fiction, poetry and polemic. A photograph of each author introduces her piece and a favourite completes it. The book is also interspersed throughout with Worldwide Food Facts.
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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April 7, 2019
A collection of writing about food, all from female writers and published by virago to commemorate Oxfam’s fiftieth anniversary in 1992. There is a brief history of Oxfam at the end.
This is a very varied collection from writers like Woolf, Germaine Greer, Attia Hosain, Kathy Lette, Sara Maitland, Susie Orbach, Shashi Deshpande, Doris Lessing, Sohaili Abdulali to mention a few. There are great contrasts here, Greer talks about the difference between hunger and starvation whilst Hosain recalls the foods of her childhood linked to feast days and times, such as Eid.
Till asserts in her introduction that women:
“are burdened with the necessity of providing food for their families, day after day, week after week, year after year … any failure to do this with good grace is readily equated with a failure of love.”
Maitland admits to hating cooking and compares the kitchen to the Gulag whilst Susie Orbach talks about the restorative power of chicken soup and provides a recipe. There’s a passage from To The Lighthouse and The Golden Notebook and a couple of short stories, some nostalgia and a look at the more negative side of the kitchen on the Indian subcontinent.
It isn’t very long and each contribution is brief. There is a good variety and a couple of writers who I was not familiar with for me to follow up
This is a very varied collection from writers like Woolf, Germaine Greer, Attia Hosain, Kathy Lette, Sara Maitland, Susie Orbach, Shashi Deshpande, Doris Lessing, Sohaili Abdulali to mention a few. There are great contrasts here, Greer talks about the difference between hunger and starvation whilst Hosain recalls the foods of her childhood linked to feast days and times, such as Eid.
Till asserts in her introduction that women:
“are burdened with the necessity of providing food for their families, day after day, week after week, year after year … any failure to do this with good grace is readily equated with a failure of love.”
Maitland admits to hating cooking and compares the kitchen to the Gulag whilst Susie Orbach talks about the restorative power of chicken soup and provides a recipe. There’s a passage from To The Lighthouse and The Golden Notebook and a couple of short stories, some nostalgia and a look at the more negative side of the kitchen on the Indian subcontinent.
It isn’t very long and each contribution is brief. There is a good variety and a couple of writers who I was not familiar with for me to follow up
Displaying 1 of 1 review