When Sheila sent me Full Moon Feast by Jessica Prentice a week ago, I flipped it open to peruse the recipes then got sucked in and stayed up until after midnight reading it.  First, let me be up front about the book's downside --- I don't think I would ever try a recipe out of the book since every single one calls for exotic ingredients I am unlikely to own.  (Orange blossom water, anyone?)

But the text, which makes up about three quarters of the book, covers a fascinating range of history, myth, and psychology about our relationship with food.  I particularly liked one of the winter chapters which asserted that electricity has changed our winter sleep patterns which in turn has changed our winter eating habits.  The author says that without electricity, we would sleep for fourteen hours on these long winter nights, half waking in the middle for a few hours of near meditation.  (In passing, she also notes that in nature most women give birth between midnight and 4 am for this very reason --- that at that point in the night, you are in a slightly altered state of consciousness and don't feel pain in the same way.)

I know that as the nights get longer and longer, my body wants to sleep more and more, and I have to poke it to get up right at dawn to match my usual summer wake-up schedule.  The book makes me wonder if perhaps I should be sleeping more in the winter.  I'm such a creature of habit and efficiency, I find myself pondering how I would get all of my winter chores done if I slept more in the winter.  And how sound is her science --- after all, didn't humans evolve in the tropics where the nights would have always been the same length?  Needs more thought....  Still, I recommend the book to anyone interested in how food affects our lives.