Never have we spoken so much about food and cuisine as a mark of the new. Over two centuries, modern bourgeois cuisine constructed and preserved the values of a culinary civilization that led the entire Western world, but after that same bourgeoisie and its defining lifestyle and economy fell into disarray, its cuisine foundered as well. The cultural void left behind by the eclipse of the modern bourgeoisie is now being filled by a creative explosion of a new cuisine. The postmodern and port-western society of our times – fluid and fragmented – designs, expounds, and insists upon new foods, cuisines, and places and ways of eating that generate enthusiasm, confusion, fear, and rejection. This book tries to uncover the most important aspects of the new, complex phenomenon of the cuisine that has come into existence, of how a society eats, and of how cuisines die, undergo metamorphosis, and are reborn.