Much Depends On Dinner [Paperback]

Food. We spend a good part of every day buying, preparing, eating, and savouring it. Only sleep and work take more time out of our lives. Margaret Visser uses the ingredients of an ordinary meal as a jumping-off point for an engaging, thoroughly researched look into one of our essential obsessions. Did you know that lettuce is a member of the daisy family? That sea salt is cultivated in salt gardens? From a mini-history of Will Kellogg and his corn flakes to the staple dish of the Tibetans (tsampa: barley flour, salted tea, and yak butter), Visser feeds our endless hunger for stories and anecdotes on food that can be shared around the groaning board.

Visser is the author of three other books: The Rituals of Dinner, The Way We Are, and a study of an Italian church, The Geography of Love. In all her work she manages to make sometimes bizarre history utterly fascinating. Aztec cannibals, for instance, were fond of eating something called “man-stew” mixed with maize. Grisly details aside, this fine book will leave you thoroughly sated and ready for an after-dinner cognac. --Mark Frutkin

Named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly, and winner of the Glenfiddich Prize for Food Book of the Year in the UK.“

MARGARET VISSER is the author of three bestselling books: Much Depends onDinner, which won the Glenfiddich Prize for Food Book of the Year and was named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly and The New York Times Book Review; The Rituals ofDinner, which won the International Association of Culinary Profession’s Literary Food Writing Award and the Jane Grigson Award in the US, and was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year; and The Way WeAre, a collection of witty and insightful essays about the way we live.She was born in South Africa,studied at the Sorbonne, and received her doctorate in Classics from the University of Toronto. She has been a contributing editor to Saturday Night magazine, and has been heard regularly on CBC Radio. Shetaught Classics at York University for eighteen years and now devotes her time to research and writing. Margaret Visser dividesher time between Toronto, Barcelona and southwestern France.