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2007 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first publication of One Continuous Picnic, a frequently acclaimed Australian classic on the history of eating in Australia. The text remains gratifyingly accurate and prescient, and has helped to shape subsequent developments in food in Australia. Until recently, historians have tended to overlook eating, and yet, through meat pies and lamingtons, Symons tells the history of Australia gastronomically. He challenges myths such as that Australia is 'too young' for a national cuisine, and that immigration caused the restaurant boom. Symons shows us that Australia is unique because its citizens have not developed a true contact with the land, have not had a peasant society. Australians have enjoyed plenty to eat, but food had to be portable: witness the weekly rations of mutton, flour, tea and sugar that made early settlers a mobile army clearing a whole continent; and the tins of jam, condensed milk, camp pie and bottles of tomato sauce and beer that turned its citizens into early suburbanites. By the time of screw-top riesling, takeaway chicken and frozen puff pastry, Australians were hypnotised consumers, on one continuous picnic. But good food has never come from factory farms, process lines, supermarkets and fast-food chains. Only when we enjoy a diet of fresh, local produce treated with proper respect, when we learn from peasants, might we at last have found a national cuisine and cultivated a continent.
Never has there been so little need to cook. Yet Michael Symons maintains that to be truly human we need to become better cooks: practical and generous sharers of food.Fueled by James Boswell's definition of humans as cooking animals (for "no beast can cook"), Symons sets out to explore the civilizing role of cooks in history. His wanderings take us to the clay ovens of the prehistoric eastern Mediterranean and the bronze cauldrons of ancient China, to fabulous banquets in the temples and courts of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Persia, to medieval English cookshops and southeast Asian street markets, to palace kitchens, diners, and to modern fast-food eateries.Symons samples conceptions and perceptions of cooks and cooking, from Plato and Descartes to Marx and Virginia Woolf, asking why cooks, despite their vital and central role in sustaining life, have remained in the shadows, unheralded, unregarded, and underappreciated. "People think of meals as occasions where you share food," he notes. "They rarely think of cooks as sharers of food."Considering such notions as the physical and political consequences of sauce, connections between food and love, and cooking as a regulator of clock and calendar, Symons provides a spirited and diverting defense of a cook-centered view of the world.Michael Symons is the author of One Continuous Picnic: A History of Eating in Australia and The Shared Table.
Over a half of adults in the US, Canada, Australia and numerous European countries are now overweight or obese, a proportion that has risen sharply in the past two decades. Dominant biomedical explanations focus on the energy equation – an imbalance between energy intake and expenditure - and remedies focus on motivating individuals to restore the balance by eating better and being more active, or – in extreme cases – surgical intervention. This book offers a perspective that sees increasing obesity as a social phenomenon as well as a public health problem. It contains detailed accounts of three generations of Australians’ experiences of changing environments and the emergence of social trends such as increasing availability of convenience foods, the individualisation and commercialisation of leisure, car reliance, and busyness. Participants' narratives are interwoven with sociological and historical analyses of changes to show how contemporary Australians are experiencing and adapting to dramatic socio-cultural and environmental changes that are reshaping their lives and, in many cases, their bodies. The book demonstrates that obesity is an unintended consequence of economic development accompanied by profound socio-cultural changes, and by identifying the key developments the authors propose leverage points. While the research was conducted in Australia, the fundamental drivers of rapid weight gain are equally present in other modern, secular societies.
Spanning 65,000 years, this book provides a history of food in Australia from its beginnings, with the arrival of the first peoples and their stewardship of the land, to a present where the production and consumption of food is fraught with anxieties and competing priorities. It describes how food production in Australia is subject to the constraints of climate, water, and soil, leading to centuries of unsustainable agricultural practices post-colonization. Australian food history is also the story of its xenophobia and the immigration policies pursued, which continue to undermine the image of Australia as a model multicultural society. This history of Australian food ends on a positive note, however, as Indigenous peoples take increasing control of how their food is interpreted and marketed.
Rachel Laudan tells the remarkable story of the rise and fall of the world’s great cuisines—from the mastery of grain cooking some twenty thousand years ago, to the present—in this superbly researched book. Probing beneath the apparent confusion of dozens of cuisines to reveal the underlying simplicity of the culinary family tree, she shows how periodic seismic shifts in “culinary philosophy”—beliefs about health, the economy, politics, society and the gods—prompted the construction of new cuisines, a handful of which, chosen as the cuisines of empires, came to dominate the globe. Cuisine and Empire shows how merchants, missionaries, and the military took cuisines over mountains, oceans, deserts, and across political frontiers. Laudan’s innovative narrative treats cuisine, like language, clothing, or architecture, as something constructed by humans. By emphasizing how cooking turns farm products into food and by taking the globe rather than the nation as the stage, she challenges the agrarian, romantic, and nationalistic myths that underlie the contemporary food movement.
What we eat, where it is from, and how it is produced are vital questions in today's America. We think seriously about food because it is freighted with the hopes, fears, and anxieties of modern life. Yet critiques of food and food systems all too often sprawl into jeremiads against modernity itself, while supporters of the status quo refuse to acknowledge the problems with today's methods of food production and distribution. Food Fights sheds new light on these crucial debates, using a historical lens. Its essays take strong positions, even arguing with one another, as they explore the many themes and tensions that define how we understand our food—from the promises and failures of agricultural technology to the politics of taste. In addition to the editors, contributors include Ken Albala, Amy Bentley, Charlotte Biltekoff, Peter A. Coclanis, Tracey Deutsch, S. Margot Finn, Rachel Laudan, Sarah Ludington, Margaret Mellon, Steve Striffler, and Robert T. Valgenti.
How the global tea industry influenced the international economy and the rise of mass consumerism Tea has been one of the most popular commodities in the world. Over centuries, profits from its growth and sales funded wars and fueled colonization, and its cultivation brought about massive changes—in land use, labor systems, market practices, and social hierarchies—the effects of which are with us even today. A Thirst for Empire takes a vast and in depth historical look at how men and women—through the tea industry in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa—transformed global tastes and habits and in the process created our modern consumer society. As Erika Rappaport shows, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries the boundaries of the tea industry and the British Empire overlapped but were never identical, and she highlights the economic, political, and cultural forces that enabled the British Empire to dominate—but never entirely control—the worldwide production, trade, and consumption of tea. Rappaport delves into how Europeans adopted, appropriated, and altered Chinese tea culture to build a widespread demand for tea in Britain and other global markets and a plantation-based economy in South Asia and Africa. Tea was among the earliest colonial industries in which merchants, planters, promoters, and retailers used imperial resources to pay for global advertising and political lobbying. The commercial model that tea inspired still exists and is vital for understanding how politics and publicity influence the international economy. An expansive and original global history of imperial tea, A Thirst for Empire demonstrates the ways that this fluid and powerful enterprise helped shape the contemporary world.
First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
In Teatimes, food historian Helen Saberi takes us on a stimulating journey beyond the fine porcelain, doilies, crumpets, and jam into the fascinating and diverse history of tea drinking. From elegant afternoon teas, hearty high teas, and cricket and tennis teas, to funeral teas, cream teas, and many more, Saberi investigates the whole panoply of teatime rituals and ephemera—including tea gardens, tea dances, tea gowns, and tearooms. We are invited to spend time in the sophisticated salons de thé of Paris and the cozy tearooms of the United States; to enjoy the teatime traditions of Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, where housewives prided themselves on their “well-filled tins”; to sit in on the tea parties of the Raj and Irani cafes in India; to savor teatimes along the Silk Road, where the samovar and chaikhana reign supreme; and to delight in the tasty dim sum of China and the intricate tradition of cha kaiseki in Japan. Steeped in evocative illustrations and recipes from around the world, Teatimes shows how tea drinking has become a global obsession, from American iced tea and Taiwanese bubble tea to the now-classic English afternoon tea. Pinkies up!
Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country claimed that “Australia was one of the first nations to find part of the meaning of life in the purchase of consumer goods.” Significantly, similar views had been expressed in the late 18th century, where everyday life in the antipodean outpost of Empire was regarded as being pecuniary and acquisitive in nature. While references to Australia as a “consumer society” continue to be made, the question of how Australia came to be so has attracted less attention. The chapters in Consumer Australia actively redress this omission by examining the ways in which the processes of selling, buying, and exchanging have characterised the experiences of consumption in every day Australian life. Prepared by leading and emerging scholars, the chapters in this unique collection critically explore the different ways that Australians have consumed products, brands, and even consumption itself from the 19th century and through the 20th century. By charting the growth and development of consumption in Australia, Consumer Australia reveals how Australia came to be a “consumer society” and asks where it is headed.