Preparing and consuming food is an integral part of identity formation, which in contemporary China embodies tension between fast-forward modernization and cultural nostalgia. Jin Feng’s wide-ranging exploration of cities in the Lower Yangzi Delta—or Jiangnan, a region known for its paradisiacal beauty and abundant resources—illustrates how people preserve culinary inheritance while also revamping it for the new millennium. Throughout Chinese history, food nostalgia has generated cultural currency for individuals. Feng examines literary treatments of Jiangnan foodways from late imperial and twentieth-century China, highlighting the role played by gender and tracing the contemporary metamorphosis of this cultural landscape, with its new platforms for food culture, such as television and the internet. As communities in Jiangnan refashion their regional heritage, culinary arts shine as markers of ethnic and social distinction.

"Heaven on Earth: Finding a Taste of Paradise on Earth" invites readers on a transformative journey to discover the beauty and joy of experiencing glimpses of heaven in their earthly lives. Through profound spiritual insights and practical guidance, this book reveals how we can cultivate a deeper sense of connection with God and live in the reality of His heavenly kingdom here and now. It explores the transformative power of faith, prayer, gratitude, and living a life centered on God's love. "Heaven on Earth" offers hope and inspiration for those longing for a taste of paradise in the midst of their daily lives, reminding them that heaven is not just a distant future, but a present reality to be experienced.

A Taste of Heaven on Earth explores the spiritual foundation of the nineteenth-century utopian Oneida Community founded by John Humphrey Noyes, whose members sought purity of heart in all thoughts, words, and activities. Following graduation from college with honors, Noyes studied at two theological seminaries, opening his heart to receive God. He discovered the Holy Spirit as our ever-present teacher, revealing the wisdom and experiences of Christ, and that the purpose of human life is preparing the heart to hear this Internal Teacher and implementing its teachings. Spend pleasant hours with many of the nearly three hundred members of Noyes's communities, people of all personalities and proclivities--how they loved and learned, worked and played, prayed and made music, and lived together with openness and harmony. All were married to all in this unique community, showing that a happy marriage may exist between two hundred and fifty as well as two. They practiced enlightened sexuality, learned emotional intelligence and spiritual self-examination, thrived with variety in work, enjoyed lifelong learning, and nurtured all children as their own. Most of all, they practiced openness to God, the only source of lasting joy and contentment.

From the extravagant use of pepper in the Middle Ages to the Protestant bourgeoisie's love of coffee to the reason why fashionable Europeans stopped sniffing tobacco and starting smoking it, Schivelbusch looks at how the appetite for pleasure transformed the social structure of the Old World. Illustrations.

Powerfully and beautifully portrays a bygone Jewish culture. An eloquent masterpiece, originally published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Includes woodcut illustrations by Ilya Schor.

Mecca is, for many, the heart of Islam. It is the birthplace of Muhammad, the direction to which Muslims turn when they pray, and the site of pilgrimage that annually draws some three million Muslims from all corners of the world. Yet the significance of Mecca is more than purely religious. What happens in Mecca and how Muslims think about the political and cultural history of Mecca has had and continues to have a profound influence on world events to this day. In this insighful book, Ziauddin Sardar unravels the meaning and significance of Mecca. Tracing its history, from its origins as a “barren valley” in the desert to its evolution as a trading town and sudden emergence as the religious center of a world empire, Sardar examines the religious struggles and rebellions in Mecca that have significantly shaped Muslim culture. An illuminative, lyrical, and witty blend of history, reportage, and memoir, Mecca reflects all that is profound and enlightening, curious and amusing about Mecca and takes us behind the closed doors to one of the most important places in the world today.

Peterson explores a change in French cooking in the mid-seventeenth century - from the heavily sugared, saffroned, and spiced cuisine of the medieval period to a new style based on salt and acid tastes. In the process, she reveals more fully than any previous writer the links between medieval cooking, alchemy, and astrology. Peterson's vivid account traces this newly acquired taste in food to its roots in the wider transformation of seventeenth-century culture which included the Scientific Revolution. She makes the startling - and persuasive - argument that the shift in cooking styles was actually part of a conscious effort by humanist scholars to revive Greek and Roman learning and to chase the occult from European life.