Edible Ideologies argues that representations of food-in literature and popular fiction, cookbooks and travel guides, war propaganda, women's magazines, television and print advertisements-are not just about nourishment or pleasure. Contributors explore how these various modes of representation, reflecting prevailing attitudes and assumptions about food and food practices, function instead to circulate and transgress dominant cultural ideologies. Addressing questions concerning whose interests are served by a particular food practice or habit and what political ends are fulfilled by the historical changes that lead from one practice to another in Western culture, the essays offer a rich historical narrative that moves from the construction of the nineteenth-century English gentleman to the creation of two of today's iconic figures in food culture, Julia Child and Martha Stewart. Along the way, readers will encounter World War I propaganda, holocaust and Sephardic cookbooks, the Rosenbergs, German tour guides, fast food advertising, food packaging, and chocolate, and will find food for thought on the meanings of everything from camembert to Velveeta, from salads to burgers, and from tikka masala to Campbell's soup.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato 1. Men and Menus: Dickens and the Rise of the "Ordinary" English Gentleman Annette Cozzi 2. "Food Will Win the War": Food and Social Control in World War I Propaganda Celia M. Kingsbury 3. Cooking In Memory's Kitchen: Re-Presenting Recipes, Remembering the Holocaust Marie I. Drews 4. "More than one million mothers know it's the REAL thing": The Rosenbergs, Jell-O, Old-Fashioned Gefilte Fish, and 1950s America Nathan Abrams 5. Cooking the Books: Jewish Cuisine and the Commodification of Difference Eric Mason 6. Typisch Deutsch: Culinary Tourism and the Presentation of German Food in English-Language Travel Guides Lynne Fallwell 7. The Embodied Rhetoric of "Health" from Farm Fields to Salad Bowls Jean P. Retzinger 8. Consuming the Other: Packaged Representations of Foreignness in President's Choice Charlene Elliott 9. From Romance to PMS: Images of Women and Chocolate in Twentieth-Century America Kathleen Banks Nutter 10. Julia Child, Martha Stewart, and the Rise of Culinary Capital Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato Contributors