Food and Power

This was an engaging read - clearly a work of scholarly ethnographic writing, but not at all inaccessible. There were (and are) aspects of the culinary milieu in Israel that were not touched upon that I feel are integral to the larger story of the topic, but understandably Avieli cannot reasonably be expected to cover everything, and the subjects he discussed were fascinating and revealing examples of power dynamics between different interest groups and communities within Israel. I appreciated, also, that while Avieli is (rightfully) extremely critical of the many social problems that exist in Israeli society, he resists the temptation to use these realities as fodder for any kind of anti-Zionist polemic (nor does he, thankfully, indulge in any overtly Zionist defences of the state). While I wouldn't generally expect an anthropologist of any integrity to indulge in polemics of that nature, this is unfortunately something one comes to expect in writing on Israel and Palestine, and it's to Avieli's credit and the book's benefit that his autoethnography manages to remain as impartial and observational (and therefore useful) as it does.