This work offers a theoretical account of the interrelationship of culture, food and memory. The Greek island of Kalymnos, where islanders claim to remember meals long past, provides the main setting for a discussion of embodiment, memory and material culture.

Cultural practices of feasting and fasting, global flows of food as both gifts and commodities, the rise of processed food and the relationship of orally transmitted recipes to the vast market in speciality cookbooks tie traditional anthropological mainstays such as ritual, exchange and death to more current concerns with structure and history, cognition and the 'anthropology of the senses'. Arguing for the crucial role of a simultaneous consideration of food and memory, this book significantly advances our understanding of cultural processes and reformulates current theoretical preoccupations.