At the Table: Food and Family around the World. Edited by Ken Albala. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2016. 342 p. Acid free $89 (ISBN 978-1-61069-737-8). E-book (978-1-61069-738-5) available, call for pricing.

Humans are losing their tradition of the daily family meal. When everyone in the family works multiple jobs or keeps different schedules, when people never learned how to cook, or when there simply is no money to buy enough food, the challenge of keeping a family intact becomes greater. The family dinner, once a daily ritual in countries around the world, has become a historical relic as well as a cultural phenomenon among cultures that can sustain such a tradition. One can publish a book about the challenges of keeping the daily family dinner alive, or one can publish an encyclopedia of the typical daily family dinner traditions of every culture. While Dr. Ken Albala has the expertise and connections to accomplish both feats, he has struggled to do so in his latest edited volume At the Table: Food and Family around the World.

Albala is professor of history and director of the Food Studies MA program at the University of the Pacific. He has written about Renaissance-era cooking and food habits, global histories of single ingredients or dishes, and modern food trends. He has also edited volumes and encyclopedias on regional and global food cultures and modern food trends. Albala’s research and publishing background gives him the expertise to edit a volume about family dinners around the world. The list of contributors selected to collaborate on this publication are academics, independent researchers, nutritionists, and writers who all have researched and written about food in different contexts. Albala had rubbed elbows with multiple contributors at culinary research events such as the annual Oxford Symposium of Food and Cookery and meetings of the Association for the Study of Food and Society. This is a both a strength and a weakness of the volume, as Albala has allowed the writers great freedom in structure, focus, and political perspective of their entries, leading to uneven coverage of the topic.

This single volume is an “anti-encyclopedia.” In his preface and introduction, Albala states that, on one hand, the focus of the volume is the dinner table as it appears around the globe. At the same time, Albala notes that our world and cultures are in flux, and it is now impossible to capture a “typical” family dinner in any country. If Albala’s intent is to capture ethnographic accounts of the family dinner, then it would have been more appropriate to publish this work as an interactive online resource such as a wiki, and not a traditional reference book. The volume contains entries on thirty-eight countries—less than twenty per cent of the world’s nations. While each entry contains sidebars covering topics from food allergies to organic food to food deserts, none of the sidebars have a direct relation to each entry’s country of focus. Entries about multicultural nations have little to no mention of how dinner traditions may differ by geography, race, religion, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, or education level. At the same time, two entries exist on South Africa—one capturing a “suburban” family dinner of a Black family, and one capturing an urban family dinner of a white family—while the entry on Israel focuses solely on the dinner of a Palestinian family. Most entries end with one recipe (although it is unclear why Indonesia’s entry ends with fourteen) that do not always match what the featured family prepared in the entry, and do not always exemplify a “traditional” meal from that culture or country, as well as a further reading section that includes works that go more in depth about the country’s food history and culture.

While this may be the first reference book focusing specifically on the family dinner around the world, other works capture food traditions around the world with greater success. For those interested in a comprehensive reference work, Albala’s four volume Food Cultures of the World Encyclopedia (ABC-CLIO 2011) is the strongest to date. For those interested in a visual account of food traditions of the “typical” family in different countries, Alusio and Menzel’s What the World Eats (Tricycle 2008) as well as their earlier Hungry Planet: What the World Eats (Material World 2005) provide eye-opening color photos, stories, and statistics about family meals.—Rachel Wexelbaum, Associate Professor/Collection Management Librarian, St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, Minnesota