The essays collected here explore the power and sensuality that food engenders within literature. The book permits the reader to sample food as a rhetorical structure, one that allows the individual writers to articulate the abstract concepts in a medium that is readily understandable.   
    The second part of Cooking by the Book turns to the more diverse food rhetorics of the marketplace. What, for example, is the fast food rhetoric? Why are there so many eating disorders in our society?  Is it possible to teach philosophy through cookery? How long has vegetarianism been popular?