Mapping the Tasteland

This book draws together the results of extensive research into the complex relationships that some modern European and Argentinean writers have enjoyed with food and wine. The European writers considered include Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Italo Svevo, Marcel Schwob, James Joyce and Robert Louis Stevenson; their Argentinean counterparts include Domingo F. Sarmiento, Lucio V. Mansilla, Roberto J. Payró and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada. Through an exploration of both fiction and non-fiction, the author shows how these thinkers’ ideas about food and wine influenced modernity and how they continue to influence contemporary issues such as ‘globalized’ menus and food poverty.