Feeding Desire – Sarah Coffin

Description

Eating is a social ritual. From dinner dates to everyday suppers, casual picnics to lavish feasts, dining brings people together for far more than satisfying the needs of the body. For centuries, cutlery has served as extensions of our hands, enriching how we experience food and the act of eating. Knives, forks, and spoons come between hand and mouth, articulating the experience of dining. Accompanying an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum (May 5-October 29, 2006), Feeding Desire is the first book to showcase the Museum’s astonishing permanent collection of American and European cutlery. Complementing and expanding on the content of the exhibition, seven original essays, accompanied by over two hundred lavish color and black-and-white illustrations, relate the surprisingly different histories of the knife, spoon, and fork, and reveal how cutlery has influenced food, fashion, design, mobility, hygiene, and consumption over the centuries. In addition, Feeding Desire looks toward the future of the tools of the table as we progress into the twenty-first century. Chocolate brown boards with blind stamp lettering. Color-illus. dj with white lettering on spice spine. 288 pp. with over 200 color and bw images. Catalogue to accompany the exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. “Explores the evolution, physical forms and social meanings of eating utensils over the past five centuries.” The book’s main focus is cutlery from Europe and the US that is in the museum’s permanent collection. With seven essays that “reveal changing ideas about food, fashion, decoration, mobility, hygiene, and consumption.” Makes you want to get out the family silver and have a feast! Gorgeous and enlightening.

Large coffee table hardback, stunning, like new, dust wrapper like new,288 pp. with over 200 color and black and white images. First Edition, truly a stunning book if you are into collecting or just wanting to know the history of cutlery, once you have this book you will look at cutlery in a whole new light, perhaps upping the set up on the table *wink*