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In Full Moon Feast; Food and the Hunger for Connection, Jessica Prentice follows the thirteen lunar cycles of an agrarian year as she reflects on local, integrative food production and traditional world cooking methods rooted in seasonality.
Seasoning the book with thoughtful anecdotes, insights, and quotations, Prentice ruminates on our cultural connection to the organic rythms of the natural world and offers recipes ranging from Spring Tonic Nettle Soup in the “Egg Moon” chapter, to Sourdough Pancakes in the “Snow Moon” chapter.
Prentice, who has been the Chef of the Headlands Center for the Arts, Director of education programs for CUESA, a founder of the organization Wise Food Ways, and co-founder of the Locavores, offers a practical cookbook that gracefully touches on some of the most profound themes relating to our understanding of food and life. In discussing the ancient Greek concepts of Zoe and Bios, (where Zoe, is conceived as life in its largest sense, whose self-consuming nature requires the sacrifice of Bios, or the particular lives of living creatures) Prentice comments "When you see everything around you (animal, vegetable, mineral) as imbued with spirit, as alive and sentient, as carrying with it a crucial part of the whole; when you view all life as inextricably interconnected by a thread, a spark, of something divine; you understand that this great beautiful creation involves death and decay just as certainly as it involves birth and resurrection.” Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection. Foreword by Deborah Madison. Published by Chelsea Green |
