David Sutton’s subtly argued and highly original book is about memory, yes; but it takes its strength from the distinctive--and easily misunderstood--nature of food and drink as consumable goods. People can feel strongly about the things they eat, and food is essential to life; yet the things we eat often seem utterly prosaic. When food is consumed, unlike other material goods, its concrete substance is gone. But the consumption of food is linked socially to all else in life and the mind, including previous and future such acts of consumption. Although consuming it makes it disappear, food binds time.

Sutton was once stung by an Oxford don’s disdainful dismissal of his interest in the relationship between food and memory (“Food and memory? Why would anyone want to remember anything they had eaten?” [p. 1]). Though the author ought not to have been piqued--after all, he was in Great Britain, where much food is best quickly forgotten, and the don was actually providing evidence for Sutton’s major contention--that smidgen of Oxford snideness doubtless provided additional stimulus for the author’s thought. In five wide-ranging chapters, sustained both by ethnography and the literature, Sutton shows how the food of memory is also the memory of food. By deftly raising questions about links among food, consumption, and memory, and juggling them in illuminating ways for serious readers, he makes a good case for his central assertions: that the food-memory connection is different from other memory connections, and that the constructed relationship between food and memory is culturally specific and cross-culturally variable. One notable strength among others is the attention he pays to production, the description of which in much recent writing among anthropologists of food has fallen victim to exchange-induced amnesia.

A large portion of the book is ethnographic and concerns the Greek citizens of the island of Kalymnos, south of Samos in the Dodecanese, where Sutton appears to have lived for at least a couple of years off and on ever since high school. His relationship with Kalymnos and the Kalymnians is itself of considerable interest. He has many friends there, but in this book his interaction rests particularly with food in all its many aspects. In Kalymnos, his status as bec fin must be matched by his reputation as a genial freeloader. (And snoop? Do they have a nickname for him that captures his interest in their food? Does he know it?) But the people of Kalymnos clearly like him; he likes them, likes their food, and most of all likes the way they like their food--and they can tell.

Ritual, exchange, eating as embodied practice, the meal itself, and the nature of recipes are his five chapter subjects. In an epilogue Sutton reviews his argument and considers remembering and forgetting together. A short review of this sort leaves room to examine only a couple of issues.

In chapter 5, “Doing/Reading Cooking,” Sutton looks at how people learn to cook and whether (or how) different forms of that learning represent different stages in the history of society. Although Sutton thinks that the way people learn to cook may be different from the way that they learn to plow a field or repair a throw net, he recognizes that there are certain commonalities to such learning, having to do with the sort of society in which many things are learned approximately the same way: by watching, by “feel,” by doing, by doing often, and by caring. The world marches on, of course. Technical change does tend to turn kitchen actors into kitchen observers; and the worldwide decline in the importance of nonmachine psychomotor acts in fulfilling daily necessities is probably correlated with a similar decline in the respect shown such skills. This is not a good era for those destined to work all of their lives at the same job, whether they be janitors, fruitpickers, or hospital orderlies. Cooking is more of the same, but the negative consequences of a loss of respect for such work are not the same for a family cook as they are for apprenticing chefs. (That so many scions of privileged families should be sweating it out these days in this famous restaurant or that one is proof that it is not the same.) Sutton shows that the Kalymnian ladies work hard at pleasing their men. Though he found the basic ingredients they used surprisingly alike--I daresay ordinary--he was surprised at how importantly small variations (in spicing, say) could bulk in people’s thinking. Such highly individualized unevenness is surely another important index of the nonmachine, keenly conscious awareness of food that these people whom he admires share with each other. I was surprised that he was surprised.

Not until his conclusion does Sutton turn to hunger. It was certainly an important theme for those of his informants who remembered the Second World War; Greece suffered terribly under Fascist occupation. Hunger is a great memory stimulant, of course; when people get hungry they remember food. But it is not so simple, either. Sutton cites the memories of concentration camp prisoners, for many of whom the memory of food was a form of resistance. He refers to Cara De Silva’s book of the food memories of the prisoners in Terezin camp, where remembering was to stand against dehumanization. As I read, I remembered Jean-Paul Kauffmann.

The same day French correspondent Jean-Paul Kauffmann arrived at Beirut Airport (May 22, 1985), he was kidnapped by extremists. He wasn’t freed for three years. Every day of his confinement, Frank Prial of The New York Times tells us, Kauffmann recited by heart the 61 chateau names of the 1855 classification of Bordeaux wines. He also wrote them down but lost his list each time his captors moved him--18 times. Then they took away his pen. By the end of 1986, he had begun to forget some of the fourth growths, and then some of the fifth growths. He was absolutely devastated by his forgetfulness. He felt he was drifting away from civilization, becoming a barbarian. Remembering was staying human, and staying a particular kind of human, too.

In the final two pages of Remembering Repasts, Sutton turns nicely to forgetting. After a long paragraph about what forgetting might have to do with food and memory, he makes a plea for ethnography: “In sum, ethnography, but ethnography that begins from the premise that food is not simply another topic that ‘symbolizes’ identity, but one that challenges us to rethink our methods, assumption and theories in new and productive ways” (p. 170).

This is an outstanding example of modern anthropology, one that reveals the unending potentialities of fieldwork for enriching our insights and improving our theories. A skillfully balanced mix of the author’s data and the data of others shows us how data--field data--fertilize the intellectual soil in which theory grows.