How We Eat: Appetite, Culture, and the Psychology of Food

An informative look at the history of eating that’s a tasty combo of fact and fun

We enjoy watching celebrity chefs on TV, but so few of us choose to cook at home. The gourmet health food industry is soaring, yet a longtime love affair with fast food endures. Food and eating habits — good and bad — have shaped cultures, accounted for behaviors, and created a sense of individual as well as cultural identity… but how? And why?

Social psychology professor Leon Rappoport treats the dinner table like the therapist’s couch, asking us to lie back and spill our guts. Tracing our culinary customs from the Stone Age to the microwave, from the raw to the nuked, How We Eat illuminates our complex and often contradictory eating habits. Along the way, we meet with the hugely successful Fanny Farmer and Betty Crocker, encounter a murder case in which a Twinkie was suspect number one, learn about the table manners of cannibals, and, ultimately, that perhaps we truly are what we eat.