?A family meal is a social construct more complicated than the tasks involved would suggest, and its study is back where sexuality was before Freud. In fact, Kaufmann reminds us, historically there have been more taboos concerning food than sex.? The International Herald Tribune ?By showing how the preparation and consumption of food form the basis of our closest personal relationships, Kaufmann provides a persuasively unromantic view of why cooking matters.? Alan Warde, University of Manchester In 1785 James Boswell and Dr Johnson were trying to come up with a way of distinguishing human beings from animals. ‘The beasts have memory, judgement, and all the faculties and passions of our mind, in a certain degree,? said Boswell, ‘but no beast is a cook.? Cooking is central to our lives, despite the fact that it never received the attention from serious scholars that it might have had Boswell?s definition caught on. The kitchen is...