Foodists: Writing About Eating from the London Review of Books

LRB Collections #2

by John Bayley, Joanna Biggs, Angela Carter

‘Food, like sex, is mostly in the head,’ John Bayley writes in the piece that gives this anthology its title. Sure enough, in the LRB’s pages, food has often been a medium for thinking about other things: history, literature, art, cultural criticism, philosophy and – in the second half of the paper’s lifetime – more political concerns, too, such as agro-industry, ecology and inequality.

This changing emphasis is salutary, but these essays also remind us that food is fun, and nothing about it is ever completely new. As his 1980 piece about vegetables makes clear, E.S. Turner, a contributor born when Edward VII was king, knew that avocados were a ‘cliché’, and that it was hard work pretending to like kale.

Featuring: John Bayley, Joanna Biggs, Angela Carter, John Lanchester, James Meek, Emma Rothschild, Steven Shapin, Adam Smyth, E.S. Turner, Margaret Visser, Bee Wilson and Francis Wyndham.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

Paperback

Published September 1, 2018

About the author

Professor John Bayley CBE, FBA, FRSL was a British literary critic and writer.

Bayley was born in Lahore, British India, and educated at Eton, where he studied under G. W. Lyttelton, who also taught Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, George Orwell and Cyril Connolly. After leaving Eton, he went on to take a degree at New College, Oxford. From 1974 to 1992, Bayley was Warton Professor of English at Oxford. He is also a novelist and writes literary criticism for several newspapers. He edited Henry James' The Wings of the Dove and a two-volume selection of James' short stories.

From 1956 until her death in 1999, he was married to the writer Dame Iris Murdoch. When she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, he wrote the book Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, which was made into the 2001 film Iris by Richard Eyre. In this film, Bayley was portrayed in his early years by Hugh Bonneville, and in his later years by Jim Broadbent, who won an Oscar for the performance. After Murdoch's death he married Audi Villers, a family friend. He was awarded the CBE in 1999.

Reviews

[Martyna · Rating 4 out of 5]

bardzo dobry zbiór esejów o jedzeniu z perspektywy socjologicznej, politologicznej czy antropologicznej. najwcześniejszy esej ze zbioru opublikowany został w 1980, a najpóźniejszy w 2017, a mimo to przemyślenia zawarte w wszystkich esejach były nadal aktualne i chociaż nie zawsze się z nimi zgadzałam to były bardzo ciekawe i autorzy używali dobrych argumentów. najbardziej podobał mi się esej o tym, jakie warunki społeczno-ekonomiczno-polityczne przyczyniają się do wytworzenia się kultury "foodies", w którym zostały porównane Chiny z XII i XIII wieku z Francją XIX i XX wieku.

[Anca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love a book that is exactly 100 pages and makes me think on every page.

[Janani · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5* // Feels wrong to mark this fairly poorly when it features such brilliant minds. Reason is merely that it was much more academic in its voice, and less literary, and I went in wanting the latter. 'Eating Alone' by Francis Wyndham is especially excellent. Ample memorable thoughts and bits of info noted along the way, not barring the blurb that called out to me at the bookshop-

'If, as Lévis-Strauss once opined, "to eat is to f*ck," then that coconut kirsch roulade is just asking for it.' - Angela Carter