The Anthropologists' cookbook

With its hors-d'oeuvre and its dessert in the form of essays from Mary Douglas and Claude Levi-Strauss, and a cook's tour of the planet's dishes from ethnographers in between, it mixes the erudite, the enticing - and the frankly emetic. Isobel White learnt in the Australian Outback that a steak left out to rot until it turned bright green could be safely savoured - "Once meat goes green it is not poisonous." So there's hope yet for that ... thing at the back of the fridge. Just be patient.