What Is Queer Food?

How We Served a Revolution

6 June 2025

Territory Rights — Worldwide.

John Birdsall (Author)

Description

A celebrated food writer’s expansive, audacious excavation of the development of modern queer identity and food culture

Food in America and Europe has long been shaped, twisted and upended by queer creatives. Beloved food writer John Birdsall fills the gap between the past and present, channelling the twin forces of criticism and cultural history to propel readers into the kitchens, restaurants, swirling party-houses and humming interior lives of James Baldwin, Alice B. Toklas, Truman Capote, Esther Eng and others who left an indelible mark on the culinary world from the margins. Queer food is brunch quiche à la Craig Claiborne, Richard Olney’s ecstatic salade composée and Rainbow Ice-Box Cake from Ernest Matthew Mickler’s White Trash Cooking. It’s the intention surrounding a meal, the circumstances behind it, the people gathered around the table.

With cinematic verve and prose that dazzles, What Is Queer Food? is a monumental work: a testament to food’s essential link to a modern queerness that reveals how, like fashion or tastes in music, food has become a language of LGBTQ+ identity.

Reviews

"In this ambitious work of social history, Birdsall unspools the story of how queer culture has informed what we eat. From the restaurant world to the AIDS crisis, the recipes of Alice B. Toklas and the preferences of Truman Capote, Birdsall presents a soup-to-nuts-to-brunch-to-all-night-diner portrait of the inextricable link between queerness and food that’s as much cultural criticism as delicious celebration." — The New York Times Book Review

"Queerness requires context. And in Birdsall’s lyrical account, food has become one of the languages that can express queer identity. . . the books present a one-two punch of historical lessons that food — whether eaten at home or in a restaurant — has been critical to the queer experience." — The Washington Post

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Hardback

9781324073796

160 x 236 mm • 304 pages

£22.99

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Ebook

9781324073802

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£21.83

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