Full Moon Feast

full-moon-feast-book

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 traditional world cuisine rooted in seasonality.

Well-researched, with a bounty of historical anecdotes, this thoughtful cookbook helps reveal how the pace and processing technologies of our lives have come to disconnect us from the organic pulse of the natural world.

Prentice, who has been the Chef of the Headlands Center for the Arts, Director of Education Programs for CUESA, founder of the organization Wise Food Ways, and co-founder of the Locavores, has both a practical and mythopoetic understanding of the culinary arts.

In each lunar cycle chapter she offers up associated recipes. There is a recipe for Spring Tonic Nettle Soup in the “Egg Moon” chapter and delightful Sourdough Pancakes in the “Snow Moon” chapter.

Prentice even allows herself to muse a bit on what the ancient Greeks called “Zoe” or life in its largest self-consuming sense.

“When you see everything around you, animal, vegetable, mineral. as imbued with spirit,” writes Prentice, “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.”