Meals Matter … why that name?

A surprising number of meal-related blog titles are occupied. Another difficulty in settling on a name is that, while some people actually used to consider meals a narrow topic, my publications have already roamed over such matters as:

• other writers who endeavoured to make a diner’s sense of the world, such as the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus and physiologist of taste Brillat-Savarin;
• the problem of the “cooking animal”, namely, why do we cook? My book on cooks recommends a distributional theory – cooks share food around – against the much more common transformation claim;
• two centuries of food industrialisation, explaining the horrors of Australian cuisine, until the heavy marketing of finished meals from the 1960s eventually revived interest;
• Australian and New Zealand cakes and biscuits;
• The flat white coffee as the greatest Antipodean gastronomic invention, and much more.

Adding to that, my next book is a critique of economics, based on the fact that meals matter more than money.

So, Meals Matter

[Update: With its publication in 2020, Columbia University Press promoted that manuscript’s subtitle “Meals matter more than money” to the book title, Meals Matter, making the blog name fortuitous]