Eating as I Go or Good Spirits

Eating as I Go: Scenes from America and Abroad

Author: Doris Friedensohn

"What do we learn from eating? About ourselves? Others? In this unique memoir, Doris Friedensohn takes eating as an occasion for inquiry. Munching on quesadillas and kimchi in her suburban New Jersey neighborhood, she reflects on the meanings of cultural inclusion and what it means to our diverse nation. Enjoying couscous in Tunisia and khatchapuri (cheese bread) in the Republic of Georgia, she explores the ways strangers maintain their differences and come together." Friedensohn's subjects range from Thanksgiving at a Middle Eastern restaurant to fried grasshoppers in Oaxaca. Her wry dramas of the dining room, restaurant, market, and kitchen ripple with geopolitical, economic, psychological, and spiritual tensions. Eating as I Go is Friedensohn's distinctive combination of memoir, traveler's tale, and cultural commentary.

Library Journal

In an engaging series of memoir essays, Friedensohn (emeritus, women's studies/American studies, New Jersey City Univ.) shares with us her lifelong quest for new cultures, foods, and tastes. The cornucopia of the world's foods has excited and challenged her for the last 50 years. Her emphasis here is on ethnic foods, food markets, and entire neighborhoods where "American food" is foreign food. Today, many of us can travel to taste the world's foods without leaving town, but Friedensohn is not content to limit her essays to the United States; she also includes her food experiences in Tunisia, Austria, Mozambique, the Republic of Georgia, Nepal, and Mexico, to name just a few of the countries where she discovered the pleasures of strange foods and how they could bring people from different cultures together. Luckily, Friedensohn's sharp insights avoid academic pretension. Instead, her collection reveals the soul of an insightful and sympathetic woman, examining the relationship between culture and food. Recommended for American culture, travel, and food collections in large public and academic libraries.-Olga B. Wise, Austin, TX Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Books about: Riuscendo alla vostra intervista: Una guida pratica per gli insegnanti

Good Spirits: A New Look at Ol' Demon Alcohol

Author: Gene Logsdon

Not long after there was Homo sapiens there was Homo sippiens, or Man the Drinker. And yet despite the simplicity of its origins, alcohol has become one of the most tightly regulated commodities produced by human beings. Vilified from the pulpit, criminalized during Prohibition, and taxed to finance every war since the time of George Washington -- alcohol is the focus of a complex love/hate relationship worldwide.

As Gene Logsdon says, "On the subject of alcohol, hypocrisy is the standard-bearer of public opinion." Or expressed another way, "Isn't it absurd that our own government will not allow us to combine grain grown on our own land, water that falls from the sky, and yeast that is everywhere in the air around us?"

Instead, imagine a world where cottage farmers grow grain to make whiskey or fuel, feed grain residues to the livestock, then return the animals' manure to the fields to make the crops flourish. It's a vision distilled of common sense and tradition -- a vision simple enough to actually work. Alas, the entrenched interests of our government with its taxes and business with its obsession for profits prevent this vision from becoming reality.

"Remember, all this innocent and simple, home-centered work, leading to pleasurable and economical drinking after long and interesting experience, is illegal. But it is not illegal to read about it."

Here is vintage Logsdon, 100-proof straight talk, with practicality and poetry to temper the occasional tirade. From his tractor-seat perch in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, Gene Logsdon once again proves himself to be one of the most daring and original chroniclers of North American farm life.

Booknews

Best known as The Contrary Farmer for the unconventional views he brings to agriculture, Ohio-based Logsdon proposes a simple program: cottage farmers grow grain to make whiskey or fuel, feed grain residues to the livestock, then return the animal's manure to the field to make the crops flourish. The problem, he admits, is that it makes no unearned profits for government or big business. He includes many anecdotes, historical and legendary. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

	Foreword	viii
	Preface	ix
	Acknowledgments	xiii
	Introduction: Toward a Sane Use of Alcohol	xv
1	The American History You Were Never Taught	1
2	My Father-in-Law, "The Old Moonshiner"	13
3	From Cider to Applejack	32
4	The Fruit Juice: A Moonshine Story from 1935	49
5	Homemade Beer	65
6	The Backyard Winery	78
7	The Adventures of a Brandy & Liqueur Illiterate	98
8	The Midnight Fox: A Bootlegging Folktale	112
9	Wandering Wide-Eyed through the World of Whiskey	128
10	The "White Whiskey" Mixers & Other Popular Drinks	150
11	Fuel Alcohol: A Way to Make Untaxed Spirits Legally	166
12	"Not Necessarily": The Slightly Fictional Story of a Stubborn Winemaker	179
	Bibliography	196