According to Pauline Adema, you smell Gilroy, California, before you see it. In Garlic Capital of the World, the folklorist and culinary anthropologist examines the role of food and festivals in creating a place brand or marketable identity. The author scrutinizes how Gilroy, California, successfully transformed a negative association with the pungent bulb into a highly successful tourism and marketing campaign. This book explores how local initiatives led to an iconization of the humble product in Gilroy. The city, a well-established agricultural center and bedroom community south of San Francisco, rapidly built a place-brand identity based on its now-famous moniker, “Garlic Capital of the World.” To understand Gilroy's success in transforming a local crop into a tourist draw, Adema contrasts the development of this now-thriving festival with events surrounding the launch and demise of the PigFest in Coppell, Texas. Indeed, the Garlic Festival is so successful that the event is all that many people know about Gilroy. Adema explores the creation and subsequent selling of foodscapes or food-themed place identities. This seemingly ubiquitous practice is readily visible across the country at festivals celebrating edibles like tomatoes, peaches, spinach, and even cauliflower. Food, Adema contends, is an attractive focus for image makers charged with community building and place differentiation. Not only is it good to eat; food can be a palatable and marketable symbol for a town or region.

How a local festival celebrating the odiferous lily gave a town a marketable identity

Offers prizewinning recipes for appetizers, soups, salads, breads, desserts, and meat, poultry, seafood, and vegetable dishes that use garlic.

Offers two hundred garlic recipes, explores garlic's medicinal benefits and the myths associated with it, and reviews its more than fifty varieties.

Finally at the beach on summer holiday, Odenpri and Sigali celebrating the realization of a childhood dream come true, scarred by Sigali’s fight to survive, are serenaded at the bonfire out of ”Necessity!” by the Newcomers, Al and Truculent. The teenage girls unknowingly molded to fulfill their destiny, are enveloped in the search of an elusive treasure. Odenpri tormented by her own failings, challenged by teenage angst, is repeatedly put to the test as she must choose to either weakly satisfy her fear or fight for what an ancient text foresees. This diverse and sexy quartet on a quirky quest in Sigali’s hot pink convertible, fight evil foes not only of self doubt, disease, and death, but the Mata Kovi as well. In life we all face challenges, what does it take to put our personal choices and fears aside to accept what truly is the right thing to do relying only on faith and hope? Despite our self doubt can we live up to our destiny? From a child’s room in Las Vegas, to a woman’s victory on the shores of history...join our heroes on their journey as they explore the Earth’s mystery, the voices of the ancients, and the prophecy of life, love, and friendship.

As "locavore" becomes part of our everyday vocabulary and food critics continue to give West Coast cuisine accolades for its freshness and sustainability, West Coast Road Eats shows how why we eat-and where we eat it-matters more than ever. Part guidebook, part travelogue, and part history lesson, West Coast Road Food is a love letter to the seafood shacks, farm stands, taquerias, ice cream parlors, burger joints, wineries, and more that make up our unique edible ecosystem. Covering more than 1,500 miles from the Canadian border to San Diego, West Coast Road Eats offers a plethora of unique restaurants that dot the freeways and scenic byways of the West Coast. With suggested itineraries, overviews of major cities, and sidebars covering everything from captivating food-factory tours to instructions on how to pick the best produce at a farm stand, this book focuses the relationship between food and a sense of place with the enduring image of the American West as a backdrop. Anna Roth is a Los Angeles-based food and travel writer whose work has appeared in publications such as Sunset, Seattle Metropolitan, Edible Seattle, Virtuoso Life, and more. She is the editor of a travel website at Demand Media in Santa Monica, CA.