I've published my opus on Kindle. It's called Cavemen, Monks and Slow Food: A History of Eating Well, and it tells the story of our perpetually unfolding relationship with food, from the time we first started walking upright to the modern sustainable food movement.Eating well means many things to many people. It can be a spiritual pursuit, as with Hindu vegetarianism and kashrut. It is also a social marker: think medieval banquets and four-star restaurants. Dietary prescriptions for eating well address health concerns, such as heart disease and diabetes.
A steak is never just a steak and a piece of bread is never just a piece of bread. Whether or not we are consciously aware of these countless layers of meaning, the allure of steak is subtly colored by the magic of the Paleolithic hunt, and the comfort of bread is inseparable from its long history as a vital staple.
Our food culture has evolved in tandem with our communication technologies. It is quite likely that we developed spoken language as a tool to organize hunts, and the earliest written documents in ancient Babylon and Egypt are contemporaneous with some of the earliest sophisticated cooking techniques. The invention of the printing press led to a proliferation of cookbooks, and today the internet puts worlds of recipes at our fingertips.
Grand cuisines require grand culinary infrastructures, but small-scale agriculture is necessary for a broad base of people to eat well. Olive and grape farmers in ancient Greece developed perhaps the first formal democracy, and modern independent farmers are creating life affirming alternatives to the industrial food behemoth.
I'm fascinated by these stories about ideas, recipes and technologies. I'm also intrigued by the possibility that a deeper understanding of our food history can help us to see past some of the blind spots that interfere with our daily ablility to make solid choices about how to eat.
So the book is available on Kindle. It's $3.99, which is cheaper than a quesadilla. If you have an Ipad with a Kindle ap, you can get it that way. I'm looking into making it available in other platforms as well, but I'm a bit of a Luddite so it'll be a process. If you're interested in reading it and you don't have the right technology, please email me and I'll get you a copy. Ebook marketing is the wild west at this point. But that's another story.
3 comments:
That is so cool. What a great price, do I just look it up from the title for Kindle? I can't wait to get a copy.
It has been a very cool process. Amazon recently introduced an option where you can make 70% royalties as long as you meet certain very reasonable requirements. This allows me to offer a great price while also making more in royalties per book than on either of my conventionally published books. I think they're working to make this a really attractive option for writers in order to offer as much quality content as possible. The trick is to give the book some legitimacy: if anyone can publish almost anything they want, then how do you show that you have something worth reading? You really set an example for me with the first edition of your book as far as getting out there and marketing. I'm going to invest in advertising on some sites such as The Ethicurean which deal seriously with food issues, and take it from there.
And yes, if you just type in my name and/or the title on Amazon it'll take you there. I actually got the title wrong initially when I was uploading, but that's in the process of being corrected. There are also a couple of links to it in this blog post.
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