Edited by Richard Sterling
Roving Gastronomes Discover the World and Its People Through the Medium of a Universal Constant: Food.
A new collection of stories includes contributions from Jonathan Raban, Frances Mayes, Jeffrey Steingarten, Jim Harrison, Jan Morris, and many more.
Close your eyes, lick your lips, and escape into a wonderfully sensual adventure of food with a new, mouth-watering collection of gastronomic tales from around the world.
The Adventure of Food: True Stories of Eating Everything, edited by Richard Sterling (Travelers’ Tales; December 1999; Trade Paperback Original; $17.95), reveals our obsession with food-how it nourishes and sustains us, teaches us about other cultures, and creates community and connection with others.
This collection continues the journey begun in Sterling’s best-selling Food: A Taste of the Road, winner of the Lowell Thomas Silver Award for Best Travel Book. Praising the first volume, Maxine Hong Kingston wrote, “Sterling’s themes are nothing less than human universality, passion, and necessity, all told in stories straight from the gut.”
The new collection of fifty-five stories includes contributions by Jonathan Raban, Frances Mayes, Jeffrey Steingarten, Jim Harrison, Jan Morris, and many more. Representing over fifty different locations, these writers take us from the Amazon to Manhattan, from Fiji to France. Stories are drawn from such diverse sources as Salon.com, Esquire, The New York Times, and Motorland Magazine, as well as original contributors and best-selling books by top contemporary writers.
In the thoughtful, curious, and delightful pursuit of sustenance we are nourished spiritually as well. Epiphanies great and small occur when we venture out into the wide world and are introduced to the unexpected through cuisine. For Robert Strauss, nibbling on one potato chip becomes an exercise in Zen meditation. Jeffrey Tayler encounters the pain of post-Soviet Russia in a humble sausage. Jeffrey Steingarten learns that dieting is not in his karma. Taras Grescoe looks into the appeal and the darkness of absinthe in Spain. Michael Peterniti relives not only part of Frangois Mitterrand’s life but his death as well, by recreating the president’s last orgiastic and illegal farewell feast to life.
Gastronomic travel is accessible and satisfying to all who are willing to taste not only food and drink, but life as well. The Adventure of Food will whet their appetite.
About the Editor
Richard Sterling is the travel editor of Fiery Foods Magazine and the editor ofFood: A Taste of the Road. He is the author of The Fearless Diner: Travel Tips and Wisdom for Eating Around the World (Travelers’ Tales 1998), and co-author of The Unofficial Guide to San Francisco (Macmillan 1998). He is at work on the first two (Vietnam and Spain) of a series of culinary guides for Lonely Planet called World Food to be released in 2000. He lives in Berkeley, California.
The Adventure of Food: True Stories of Eating Everything
Edited by Richard Sterling
Published by Travelers’ Tales
Publication Date: December 1999
Trade Paperback Original
ISBN: 1-885211-37-6; 320 pages; $17.95 U.S., $26.95 Canada
Available from bookstores, 1-800-998-9938, or www.travelerstales.com.