For the first time, all of Harrison's food writing is available in one volume. Any reader of Harrison's fiction is struck by the love for food, wine, and other sensual pleasures that permeates it--and anyone who has read his essays and journalism has encountered a food critic unlike any other: unpretentious, witty, and unabashedly passionate.
Jim Harrison is one of this country's most beloved writers, a muscular, brilliantly economic stylist with a salty wisdom. For more than twenty years, he has also been writing some of the best essays on food around, now collected in a volume that caused the Santa Fe New Mexican to exclaim: To read this book is to come away convinced that Harrison is a flat-out genius -- one who devours life with intensity, living it roughly and full-scale, then distills his experiences into passionate, opinionated prose. Food, in this context, is more than food: It is a metaphor for life. From his legendary Smart and Esquire columns, to present-day pieces including a correspondence with French gourmet Gerard Oberle, fabulous pieces on food in France and America for Men's Journal, and a paean to the humble meatball, The Raw and the Cooked is a nine-course meal that will satisfy every appetite.

Our 'poet laureate of appetite' [Harrison] may be, but the collected essays here reflect much more. -- John Gamino, The Dallas Morning News

[A] culinary combo plate of Hunter S. Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, Julian Schnabel, and Sam Peckinpah.... -- Jane and Michael Stern, The New York Times Book Review

Jim Harrison is the Henry Miller of food writing. His passion is infectious. -- Jeffrey Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal