Books about Sustenance from Amazon.com

This is a book-lover's book about food: about taste, smell, touch, appetite, and all the pleasures of the table. It features 77 poems and prose pieces by some of the world's finest writers, from Basho to Betty Fussell, Colette to Calvin Trillin - all selected and complemented with illustrations by artist/anthologist Bascove, the creator of the best-selling Where Books Fall Open. The witty selections are complemented by fifteen full-color paintings by the editor, paintings whose "gently voluptuous figuration [is] beautiful...Their most deeply felt quality is a kind of animating tendresse all too rare today" (Gerrit Henry, Art in America). Beautifully conceived and lovingly produced, here is the perfect book for the most discriminating literary gourmet on your holiday gift list.

Some of the authors represented in Sustenance and Desire: Diane Ackerman · Roy Blount Jr. · Anne Caston · Lucille Clifton · Billy Collins · Robertson Davies · Michael Dorris · M.F.K. Fisher · Betty Fussell · Allen Ginsberg · Donald Hall · Jane HirschWeld · Langston Hughes · Jane Kenyon · Barbara Kingsolver · Maxine Kumin · Stanley Kunitz · Jhumpa Lahiri · Primo Levi · Audre Lourde · Elizabeth Macklin · Czeslaw Milosz · Vladimir Nabokov Pablo Neruda · Joyce Carol Oates · Mary Oliver · Marcel Proust · May Sarton · James Seay · Diane Wakoski · Derek Walcott · Richard Wilbur.
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Everywhere you look people are more aware of what they eat and where their food comes from. In a cafeteria in Los Angeles, children make their lunchtime food choices at fresh-fruit and salad bars stocked with local foods. In a community garden in New York, low-income residents are producing organically grown fruits and vegetables for their own use and to sell at market. In Madison, Wisconsin, shoppers select their food from a bounty of choices at a vibrant farmers' market. Together at the Table is about people throughout the United States who are building successful alternatives to the contemporary agrifood system and their prospects for the future.

At the heart of these efforts are the movements for sustainable agriculture and community food security. Both movements seek to reconstruct the agrifood system--the food production chain, from the growing of crops to food production and distribution--to become more ecologically sound, economically viable, and socially just. Allen describes the ways in which people working in these movements view the world and how they see their place in challenging and reshaping the agrifood system. She also shows how ideas and practices of sustainable agriculture and community food security have already woven their way into the dominant agrifood institutions. Allen explores the possibilities this process may hold for improving social and environmental justice in the American agrifood system.

Together at the Table is an important reminder that much work still remains to be done. Now that the ideas and priorities of alternative food movements have taken hold, it is time for the next--even more challenging--step. Alternative agrifood movements must acknowledge and address the deeper structural and cultural patterns that constrain the long-term resolution of social and environmental problems in the agrifood system..
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The term Asia is a problematic and highly artificial construct, because hardly anything--not language, religion, politics, or even geography--unites this huge area. Within the context of this study, however--which focuses on parts of South, Southeast, and East Asia (home to the vast majority of the population)--there exists a unifying factor of paramount significance: rice. Not only is rice the staple food in these regions, it is the focal point of a pervasive set of interrelated beliefs and practices. For those who consume it, this foodstuff is considered divinely given and is felt to sustain them in a special way, one that may be understood as constitutional and even spiritual. This volume explores beliefs and practices relating to rice as they are made manifest in the unique arts and material cultures of the various peoples considered.

Incorporating essays by twenty-seven authorities representing a wide variety of cultures and writing from diverse perspectives, the book is astounding in its polyphony. The thirty-five lavishly illustrated essays describe rice-related rituals and beliefs in parts of Thailand, Nepal, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, China, and Korea. Throughout, the juxtaposition of magnificent photographs of works of art--paintings, prints, ceramics, textiles, lacquerware, and sculpture--with objects of a more humble nature--agriculturalimplements,rice-straw ornaments, cooking utensils, baskets, puppets, votive plaques, and more--serves to indicate the striking pervasiveness of rice in all aspects and all walks of life. Wedding ceremonies, parades, festivals, celebrations of birth, rites held to honor the rice goddess, and those performed to ensure success at every step in the rice-growing cycle are vividly described and illustrated with striking field photographs. The whole gives the reader the rare opportunity to compare similarities and differences in how a rich array of Asian cultures views the food that nourishes them..
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The stability of the former Soviet states is threatened by their precarious geopolitical position within a turbulent economic and political environment. Swords and Sustenance explores the complex economic dimension of national security for two key post-Soviet countries, Belarus and Ukraine—that is, how they have dealt with the challenges posed by internal economic and political reform and their relationships with Russia and the West.

The book first examines how differing commitments to economic and political reform (reform is largely absent in Belarus) affect Belarusian and Ukrainian approaches to security. It then considers the central role of Russia, and how Russian interests and policies toward Belarus and Ukraine limit the two countries' foreign and domestic policy choices. Two chapters discuss the national security implications for Belarus and Ukraine of two key economic factors in their foreign policy: energy trade (in the form of oil, gas, and pipelines) and military-industrial cooperation (including the sale of arms). Finally, the book considers the relationships of Belarus and Ukraine with regional and global institutions and explores the policies of the EU, NATO, and the United States toward Belarus and Ukraine..
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In the year 1846, sixteen-year-old Martha Burt and her family leave their homestead in Illinois and travel westward on the trail mapped out by Lewis and Clark on their return from the Oregon Territory to Missouri. The men in the wagon train were energized by dreams of free land and a better life for all, dreams sometimes incomprehensible to their womenfolk, who endured incredible hardships on the journey. The wagon train arrives in the Oregon Territory six months later, having survived sandstorms, Indian attacks, prairie fires, buffalo stampedes, and the death of many fellow travelers. Martha grows from a sheltered young girl into a competent woman. The pioneers are deeply saddened by the loss of so many loved ones, yet are filled with hope by the possibilities the future holds..
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