It seems that everyone today is fascinated by food. Literature and popular culture prove it. We face an ever-expanding pantry of culinary poems, memoirs, histories and travelogues, not to mention polemics debating the politics of the table, analysing the medical rights and wrongs of eating, and investigating the morality of the contemporary food chain. Visual artists have long focused on still lifes of food; now films and television programmes glamourise cooks, cooking and eating.

In The Culinary Imagination, the revered scholar Sandra M. Gilbert traces our gastronomic ideas through myths and memoirs, novels, poems, television "soup operas", food blogs, paintings and films. The Culinary Imagination is a wide ranging, erudite survey of the ways in which our culture’s artists have represented food in a range of genres.