ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the expansive history of gastronomic writing before focusing on its development as a self-consciously literary movement in post-Revolutionary France, a movement that Grimod's Almanach spearheaded. In the case of nineteenth-century Paris, a generation of food writers redefined gourmandise by cutting its cord to gluttony, hence to notions of moral and bodily impropriety, and hooking it instead to gastronomy. Moving to the twentieth century, the project of counter-gastronomy coalesces in a set of modernist texts that employ culinary parody and satire as strategies for rejecting bourgeois consumerism. As with French gastronomy, the rise of restaurants aided the development of a varied gastronomic literature in China, albeit significantly earlier than in France. The rapidly expanding international marketplace for restaurant reviews and culinary guides in the twentieth century arguably did little to address the gendered power dynamic in French gastronomy.
