Intimate Eating

“Anita Mannur’s extraordinary analyses of cooking and eating in photography, film, television, novels, blogs, and performance art creates new forms of the public in unexpected places: inside bedrooms and kitchens, alongside food trucks, and under the white tent of The Great British Bake Off. She generates in her readers a hunger for queer kinships with friends and strangers forged outside of the patriarchal domain of family life. Intimate Eating is powerful reading for Asian American studies, queer and feminist of color studies, and food studies: I want to eat every meal with this book.” - Bakirathi Mani, author of Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America

“In this brilliant, urgent, and necessary book Anita Mannur underscores one of the central tenets of neoliberalism: the increased privatization of everyday life and attacks on the public. She vividly shows how nonnormative subjects navigate this trend, turning private spaces and practices via the culinary into ones that foster sociability, intimacy, community, and belonging. Through the provocative and timely concept of ‘intimate eating publics,’ Mannur has captured the pleasures and possibilities of publics and how they act as sites of forging radical ways of belonging.” - Mark Padoongpatt, author of Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America

"[Mannur's] reflections move back and forth between a scholarly tone which at times does not recuse itself from jargon and a personal voice that is able to express raw—at times joyful, at times painful–emotions. Both styles are effective in weaving engaging arguments and developing a critical analysis of the material at hand. Mannur’s memories of family dinners and the progressive dissolution of her marriage are honest, direct, and passionate, without invalidating the rigor of her analysis. . . . In Intimate Eating, Mannur pushes us to embark on our own explorations to reassess pieces of popular culture that we may be familiar with but whose power we may not be fully aware of." - D. Sutton, Food Anthropology

"Mannur brings an acute tongue and sensory analysis to a wide range of contemporary samplings, which in itself provides a dizzying array of the author’s scope." - Christine R. Yano, Society for U.S. Intellectual History

"In theorizing food cultures as social and aesthetic formations, Mannur vividly describes how food and the sense of belonging that food uniquely cultivates can turn a sense of alienation and even loneliness into intimacy and pleasure." - Rumya S. Putcha, Winterthur Portfolio

"A valuable guide to the vexed terrain of dining in its relation to social and political community."
  - Parama Roy, MELUS

"While Intimate Eating is not history per se, it possesses a historical sensibility with its very modern archive. Its case studies will surely intrigue interdisciplinary scholars and provoke interesting discussions with students." - Lori A. Flores, Journal of American Ethnic History