(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.) – On Monday, March 5, 2012, at 6:30 p.m., New Yorker columnist Adam Gopnik will address How Did Food Happen in France? drawing on his musings in his latest book, The Table Comes First: Family, France and the Meaning of Food. The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held in Griffin Hall, room 3, on the Williams College campus.

Newsweek called Gopnik’s treatise “more ambitious than a history of restaurants – it’s about how we taste, dream, and argue about food. He explores the extremes of strict localism… He gets into the heads of apparent adversaries – the meatless crowd and the whole-beast fiends, the Slow Food and molecular movements, the New and Old World wine advocates – and gives each its place in the grand foodie pantheon.”

Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi calls The Table Comes First: Family, France and the Meaning of Food “The perfect book for any intellectual foodie, a delicious book packed with so much to sink your teeth into.”

Gopnik is renowned for his essay collection Paris to the Moon, detailing his life with his family in the French capital. He has also written The King in the Window and Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York and edited the anthology of Americans in Paris for the library of America. His books The Table Comes First, Winter, and Paris to the Moon will be for sale before the talk.

Gopnik has won the National Magazine Award for essays and for criticism three times, as well as the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting.