In 1997, when we proposed the first Food and Culture Reader, we had to persuade Routledge of the importance of publishing it. In 2012, Routledge had to persuade us to undertake the arduous task of reviewing the incredibly expanded literature to produce a third edition. We hope that the current selection of articles gives a snapshot of how the field has grown and developed from its early foundations. Cultural anthropology remains the central discipline guiding this field. Food and nutritional anthropology in particular, and food studies generally, manage to rise above the dualisms that threaten to segment most fields of study. This field resists separating biological from cultural, individual from society, and local from global culture, but rather struggles with their entanglements. Food and culture studies have somehow made interdisciplinarity workable. Sometimes co-opting, more often embracing the history and geography of food as part of the holistic emphasis of anthropology, food studies have become increasingly sophisticated theoretically. We hope these papers reveal the roots of contemporary issues in food studies, and we acknowledge our bias towards particular subjects that most engage our interest.
Scholarship in food studies has expanded remarkably over the past decade. A quick and by no means exhaustive bibliographic search turns up scores of recent food books in fields as diverse as philosophy (Heldke 2003, Kaplan 2012, Korsmeyer 2002), psychology (Conner and Armitage 2002, Ogden 2010), geography (Carney 2001, 2010, Friedberg 2009, Guthman 2011, Yasmeen 2006), film studies (Bower 2004, Ferry 2003, Keller 2006)1, and architecture (Franck 2003, Horwitz and Singley 2006), not to mention the vast literature in food’s traditional fields of nutrition, home economics, and agriculture. Countless new texts abound on food in literature—from the study of eating and being eaten in children’s literature (Daniel 2006) to food symbols in early modern American fiction (Appelbaum 2006) and classical Arab literature (Van Gelder 2000), to post-Freudian analysis of literary orality (Skubal 2002).
In its more longstanding disciplinary homes, food continues to fascinate, so we find texts exploring the history of food from the Renaissance banquet (Albala 2007a) through the broad sweep of time (Claflin and Scholliers 2012, Parasecoli and Scholliers 2012) to the future of food (Belasco 2006); from the United States (Williams-Forson 2006) to Italy (Capatti and Montanari 2003, Montanari 2010) and all of Europe (Flandrin and Montanari 1999); to the history of many specific foods including tomatoes (Gentilcore 2010), beans (Albala 2007b), turkey (Smith 2006), chocolate (Coe and Coe 2000), salt (Kurlansky 2003), and spices (Turner 2004). Sociologists have not hesitated to stir the food studies pot (Ray 2004), and anthropologists have continued to produce work on topics as varied as hunger in Africa (Flynn 2005), children’s eating in China (Jing 2000), the global trade in lamb flaps (Gewertz and Errington 2010), food and memory in Greece (Sutton 2001), the globalization of milk (Wiley 2010), Japan’s largest fish market (Bestor 2004), the culture of restaurants (Beriss and Sutton 2007), and the role of cooking in human evolution (Wrangham 2010).
These examples provide some measure of the many texts that have been published in the last decade. Why has the field exploded so? We would like to suggest several reasons for this explosion. Without a doubt, feminism and women’s studies have contributed to the growth of food studies by legitimizing a domain of human behavior so heavily associated with women over time and across cultures. A second reason is the politicization of food and the expansion of social movements linked to food. This has created an increased awareness of the links between consumption and production, beginning with books on food and agriculture (e.g. Guthman 2004, Magdoff et al. 2000) as well as more interdisciplinary work on food politics (Guthman 2011, Nestle 2003, Patel 2007, Williams-Forson and Counihan 2012). A third reason is that once food became a legitimate topic of scholarly research, its novelty, richness, and scope provided limitless grist for the scholarly mill, as food links body and soul, self and other, the personal and the political, the material and the symbolic. Moreover, as food shifts from being local and known, to being global and unknown, it has been transformed into a potential symbol of fear and anxiety (Ferrieres 2005), as well as of morality (Pojman 2011, Singer and Mason 2006, Telfer 2005).
Scholars have found food a powerful lens of analysis and written insightful books about a range of compelling contemporary issues: diaspora and immigration (Gabaccia 1998, Ray 2004, Ray and Srinivas 2012); nationalism, globalization, and local manifestations (Barndt 1999, Inglis and Gimlin 2010, Wilk 2006a, 2006b); culinary tourism (Long 2003); gender and race-ethnic identity (Abarca 2006, Williams-Forson 2006); social justice and human rights (Kent 2007, Wenche Barth and Kracht 2005)2; modernization and dietary change (Counihan 2004, Watson 1997); food safety and contamination (Friedberg 2004, 2009, Nestle 2004, Schwartz 2004); and taste perception (Howes 2005, Korsmeyer 2002, 2005). Many of these subjects have important material dimensions, which have also been studied by archaeologists, folklorists, and even designers, as food leaves its mark on the human environment.
The explosion of the field of food studies is also reflected in new and continuing interdisciplinary journals such as Agriculture and Human Values, Appetite, Culture and Agriculture, The Digest, Food and Foodways, Food, Culture and Society, Gastronomica, The Anthropology of Food, and Nutritional Anthropology. Hundreds of websites inform food professionals, researchers, and the general public. Groundbreaking documentary films such as Fast Food Nation, The Garden, Supersize Me, The Future of Food, The Real Dirt on Farmer John, King Corn, Farmageddon, and Two Angry Moms have called attention to problems in our food system and efforts to redress them. Food advocacy is reflected in food movements that promote organic, local, fairly traded, and slow food, revitalizing vegetarianism and freeganism (Van Esterik 2005), and decrying what fast, processed food has done to our bodies and communities. Of particular interest is how food-focused social movements interact with one another, and with academic research (Belasco 2007).
The last few years have also seen a dramatic increase in popular books about food, some by talented journalists such as Michael Pollan, and others by food faddists more closely linked to the diet industry, the latter often relying on hearsay rather than research. It is important that students understand that the papers in this reader come from specific disciplinary perspectives and are based on sound research. We hope that this Reader helps students acquire the critical skills to distinguish between the different sources of information about food.
Given the vastness of the food studies repast, there is no way this book can offer up a complete meal. Rather we envision it as an appetizer to introduce the field to the reader—a taste of the diverse array of scrumptious intellectual dishes that await further pursuit. We have chosen articles that are high quality and that explore issues of enduring importance written by some of the leading food studies scholars. “Write a book with legs,” our editor urged us in 1997—and we did. But those legs have taken food studies in exciting new directions in the last decade, and this revised Reader reflects these changes.
The third edition retains the classic papers reflecting the foundations of food studies, and provides an interdisciplinary collection of cutting-edge articles in the social sciences that combine theory with ethnographic and historical data. We hope our readers will find this third edition engages even more deeply with both past and present scholarship on food and culture.
From the first reader, we retain the wise words of M.F.K. Fisher, and reaffirm that food touches everything and is the foundation of every economy, marking social differences, boundaries, bonds, and contradictions—an endlessly evolving enactment of gender, family, and community relationships.3
In rethinking and updating the “Foundations” section, we recognize the significant contributions these authors have made to food studies by introducing basic definitions and conceptual tools used by later scholars. The papers we have retained in this edition are considered classics and are fundamental for demonstrating the history of food studies. While we continue to value the pioneering work by Bruch (1979, 2001) and de Certeau (2011) which we included in earlier editions, we have omitted them in this Reader to make room for other approaches and because new editions have made their work easily accessible. Our selection demonstrates the centrality of cultural anthropology to the development of the field.4 We begin with Margaret Mead’s 1971 Redbook article on “Why Do We Overeat?”, in which she explores the very contemporary problem of the relation between overindulgence and guilt. This piece illustrates Mead’s commitment to making the insights of anthropologists available to the public and we open with it as a tribute to Mead’s pioneering work as one of the earliest anthropologists to articulate the centrality of foodways to human culture and thus to social science.5 Her article draws attention to the double role of many anthropologists who write about food as both academics and advocates, a topic explored further in the last section of the Reader.
The classic articles by Barthes, Bourdieu, and Lévi-Strauss present different approaches to food’s ability to convey meaning. Barthes’s ruminations on “The Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption” provide an idiosyncratic account of the semiotic and symbolic power of foodways—an account that is not always tightly linked to ethnographic evidence, but is highly provocative and anticipates much later writing on food as communication. In contrast, Bourdieu provides mammoth amounts of ethnographic detail on food in French families in his book, Distinction. This challenging author opens up a new world of scholarship to students, particularly around the concept of class. We were concerned that Bourdieu’s influence in food studies was not being fully recognized because of the difficulty students and teachers have in accessing and understanding the ethnographic context from which his concepts of life style and habitus emerged. This small excerpt on food and meals gives readers a sample of Bourdieu’s contribution.
While many have critiqued the specifics of Lévi-Strauss’s “Culinary Triangle,” and he himself later revised his formulations in his 1978 book, The Origin of Table Manners, this piece remains a classic structuralist statement about food preparation as language. Mary Douglas builds on the work of Barthes and Lévi-Strauss to explain Jewish dietary law, a much debated topic in the field of food and culture and an excellent case study for examining food prohibitions and symbolism. In this edition we have included Douglas’s chapter on “The Abominations of Leviticus” from her path-breaking book Purity and Danger (1966). Although Douglas later revised her argument in “Deciphering a Meal” (1999) to address subsequent scholarship, we feel that her original formulation has value for its simplicity and elegance. While Douglas explains Jewish food prohibitions on the basis of the religious conception of holiness based on wholeness, Marvin Harris rejects semiotic interpretations of the abomination of pigs and offers a cultural materialist explanation based on economic and ecological utility. The mystery of food taboos—even when the prohibited foods are available, nutritious, and “edible”—is a test case for exploring the gustatory selectivity of all human groups, and a wonderful example of how the same cultural phenomenon can be explained from different theoretical viewpoints.
We have returned to Jack Goody’s wonderful article on “Industrial Food” from the first edition, since no other anthropologist frames the historical context of the industrialization of food processing as well. His study of the changes in the British food system that made colonial expeditions possible sets up Mintz’s memorable paper on “Time, Sugar and Sweetness” in the Caribbean, an appropriate tribute to his influence on the field. Mintz shows how the rich controlled access to desirable high status sugar, until it was produced in sufficient quantity to become a working class staple rather than a luxury consumed only by the elite; this transformation—and the processes of slavery, global trade, and worker exploitation on which it depended—changed the course of human history.
Our second section considers the expression of race, class, nation, and personhood through food production and consumption. It recognizes the productive crossfertilization between food studies, gender studies, and race-ethnic studies marked by a plethora of publications, including Inness’s four volumes (2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2005); Abarca’s (2006) study of culinary chats among Mexican and Mexican- American working class women; Witt’s (1999), Williams-Forson’s (2006), Bower’s (2008), and Opie’s (2008) books on African-American foodways; and Avakian and Haber’s (2005) interdisciplinary edited collection on feminist approaches to food studies.
We open this section with Williams-Forson’s paper about food stereotypes which uncovers both the harmful effects of controlling images on African Americans, and also the ways in which Black women have resisted oppression and fostered cultural survival by reversing the stereotypes surrounding chicken and using it as a source of income and community bonding. While the food studies literature is replete with work on the female gender and food, there has still been little research on how food and masculinity construct each other beyond Julier and Lindenfeld’s (2005b) edited special issue of Food and Foodways on “Masculinities and Food.” We have included two papers from that issue—in the next section is Parasecoli’s on how fitness magazines construct male bodies and food, and in this section is Holden’s on how Japanese food television transmits images of ideal masculinity based on power, authority, and consumerism. Holden’s article reveals how television can provide exciting new opportunities for foodways research; Swenson’s article demonstrates how programs on the American Food Network both challenge and uphold gender binaries that are increasingly problematic in North American culture.
We follow with Allison’s fascinating article on how women reproduce Japanese definitions of subservient femininity through their construction of children’s lunch boxes, or obentos. Counihan uses food-centered life histories to document the voices of traditionally muted Hispanic women of rural southern Colorado who challenge notions that Mexican American women are compliant housewives complacently accepting subservient feeding roles. They reveal differential behaviors and attitudes towards food work that promote empowerment. To avoid limiting understandings of food and gender to heterosexual populations, we have included Carrington’s paper on food, gender identity, and power in gay and lesbian households, one of very few published studies of non-heteronormative populations. Carrington finds that food work is associated with femininity and subservience. While the cooks in both sets of families often enact deference by catering to partners’ preferences, lesbigay couples implicitly acknowledge the subordinating dimensions of that practice by denying the extent of the feeders’ work and the inequality it implies.6
Rachel Slocum’s article moves the focus on race and gender outside the home to the farmers’ market where she looks at intimate interactions between diverse people and food. She uses corporeal feminist theory to suggest how gender and race are constructed in food purchases. Dylan Clark looks at identity constructions in self-defined punks through their food practices and ideologies enacted in a grubby Seattle restaurant called the Black Cat Café. He uses insights from Lévi-Strauss and Marx to examine punk cuisine as a challenge to the capitalist food system and its entrenched inequalities, environmental destruction, and wastefulness. Punks offer an alternative ethic and practice of consumption to demonstrate how eating is an ideological as well as a physical act.
In our third section, we include articles that consider eating and the body from variety of disciplinary and topical perspectives. A key issue in Western women’s relationship to food and body for hundreds of years has been their unremitting fasting. We have retained Caroline Bynum’s striking discussion of how medieval women used food to gain religious and cultural power. By giving food to the poor, exuding milk from their bodies, and relentlessly fasting, they were able to subvert the economic control of husbands and the religious authority of male priests to commune directly with God.7 Bynum’s article sets the historical stage for the following two very different articles on contemporary eating disorders. Philosopher Susan Bordo challenges the notion that troubled eating is restricted to white women, and describes its permeation throughout United States communities of color and around the globe.8 Anthropologist Richard O’Connor uses interviews with recovered North American anorexics to question the medicalization of anorexia nervosa which is enacted through an enduring mind body dualism, and to show how young anorexics obsess not over beauty but over self-control, an important value in today’s society.
While much work has looked at women’s difficult relationship to food and body, men do not escape cultural manipulation through ideologies of food and body, as Parasecoli’s article demonstrates. He finds that men’s fitness magazines alienate men from cooking except in pursuit of sex, reduce eating to a form of body-building, and propose a nearly unattainable ideal of fitness. David Sutton looks at the body in a very different and more positive way by focusing on corporeal cooking skill as an enactment of practical knowledge, sensory awareness, and memory. Combining ethnographic research in Greece and the United States with an analysis of anthropological literature on the senses, he explores how cooking tools and sense organs are repositories of tradition that face challenges from the values and practices of modernity. Gisèle Yasmeen’s article (a different one from that used in the second edition) also broadens the notion of consumption and embodiment by considering the performance of gender through public eating in Thai food stalls. In addition to revealing the changing notions of Thai food, she shows how public eating relates to female labor force participation.
Ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan examines the important health aspect of consumption and embodiment in his study of the desert dwelling Seri Indians of Northern Mexico and their rapidly increasing rates of type-two diabetes. Listening to elders who asserted that diabetes was non-existent two generations earlier, and thus rejecting simple genetic explanations for the disease, Nabhan suggests that dietary changes towards high-sugar, low fiber, rapidly digested foods have caused this major health problem and that traditional “slow release” desert foods are protective against diabetes. This research provides support from a nutritional and health perspective for global efforts to promote local foods and traditional agriculture, a goal also endorsed by Robert Albritton. He engages with concerns over food, body, and health with his interrogation of the paradoxical contemporary situation where rates of hunger and obesity increase simultaneously. He shows how an analysis of the political economy of capitalism can explain this paradox, and can provide a path to reforming the food system to promote healthy bodies and well-nourished consumers while sustaining the earth that feeds us all.
Globalization is not new; it is not a one way exchange of items and ideas, and certainly not an expansion of values from Euro-America to peripheries lacking their own culinary identities. But it is probably also true that at no time in history has the pace of change been so rapid and so tied up with new technologies. Neoliberal practices such as deregulation and just-in-time production make our global food system even more vulnerable to abuse. It is a challenge for international and national regulatory agencies to keep up with, let alone solve problems caused by this new economic environment.
Food globalization draws our attention to diasporic identities, authenticity, food nostalgia, and power. Srinivas weaves these themes together through her examination of packaged food consumption in Bangalore, India, and Boston, USA. Transnational instant foods, such as chutneys and spice powders, play interesting roles in the construction of female Indian identity among middle class families in the two locations. The loss of home-cooking also occurs in Belize, where families define themselves and their nation through food consumption. Wilk examines historical transformations in Belizean food resulting from colonialism and globalization. Reversing the lens, Heldke examines how food adventurers at home reproduce “cultural food colonialism” by seeking and cooking ethnic foods to satisfy their taste for the exotic other without actually encountering “real” others on their own terms. She raises important questions about the meaning of “authenticity” in food studies. While there have been many critiques leveled against claims about authentic traditional foods, she brings attention to recipe authorship and ownership, challenging scholars and cookbook writers to think about their responsibility to the native cooks whose recipes they appropriate.
Both Leitch and Pilcher examine the ideology and practices of the Slow Food Movement, and its efforts to foster local, sustainable, and just food production. Leitch looks at Slow Food’s work in its country of origin, Italy, through a fascinating case study of pork fat—lardo di Colonnata—in the Carrara region famous for its marble on which the lard is cured in humid underground cellars. Achievement of protected status for this traditional product raises questions of national autonomy and identity in the context of the European Union’s efforts to impose universal food safety standards. Pilcher investigates the relevance of the Slow Food Movement to Mexico’s culinary traditions and sees similar issues to those confronted in Italy, as Mexican peasant producers strive for living wages to produce traditional varieties of maize and handmade tortillas, in competition with industrially processed versions from global chains like Taco Bell.
Pizza is both authentically local and universal; Thai pizza, German pizza, and Japanese pizza exist as hybrid foods in globalized settings. Rossella Ceccarini draws attention not only to hybrid foods, but also to the transnational experiences of the food workers who create these products in Japan. Much like pizza in Japan, hamburgers in China are modern standardized foods. Yan stresses that the attraction of consuming American fast foods has more to do with their social context and meaning than with their taste in his intriguing ethnographic study of McDonald’s in Beijing.
Barndt’s article introduces us to three women from her long-term project on the tomato food chain (Barndt 2007). Through their stories, we see how agri-businesses, fast food giants, and supermarket chains increasingly rely on “flexible,” part-time, low-wage female labor, which enables them to generate huge profits at the expense of women workers who lack health and other benefits, cannot earn a living wage, and must constantly juggle their lives to accommodate their ever-changing work schedules. Food globalization sets up complex problems in households, communities, NGOs, and UN agencies. But as these papers demonstrate, ethnographers are well prepared to shift directions and pick up on subtle changes that reveal the intricacies of global food practices.
If the section on Food and Globalization sets readers up for encountering a food system out of the hands of consumers, this last section renews optimism about how individuals and groups are challenging and contesting globalized food systems. Those activists working to transform the food system, however, are working within a new economic context. This section provides examples of some of the recent food activism undertaken since the publication of the second edition of the Food and Culture Reader. It is a reminder that all published work needs to be situated in the decade or even year of its writing (as we have done with the papers in this new edition), and that complex issues underlying food activism remain important long after attention has shifted from boycott Nestle to eat local or slow food. Just as every mouthful has a history, every cause has a past, present, and hopefully, a future.
Food activism has been around longer than food studies. What has changed is that only recently have the activities of activists been observed, analyzed, and reflected upon as subjects/objects of research. Most research remains grounded in the political economy of food, but reflects the ever more sophisticated work done in the last decade on how contemporary food systems are changing. The articles demonstrate that food commodification is deeply implicated in perpetuating and concealing gender, race, and class inequalities while transforming cultures.
Case studies on meat (Schlosser), baby foods (Van Esterik) and “yuppie chow” (Guthman) exemplify some of the social implications of the industrial processing of basic foods. Schlosser carries forward the work he did in his renowned Fast Food Nation (2002) to examine the many health dangers suffered by meat-packing workers—including broken bones, muscle strain, burns, and severed limbs—resulting from exhausting and monotonous labor for low wages, few benefits, and high turnover. Worker exploitation results from the concentration of the meatpacking industry, its reliance on immigrant labor, its concerted resistance to unionizing efforts, and its political power.
Guthman’s insight into organic farming in California is revealed in her groundbreaking research on the subject (2004, 2011). In her study of the salad mixes known by organic farmers as “yuppie chow,” she critiques the dualistic thinking that contrasts alternative farming with industrial farming, fast with slow food, and even good with bad eaters. Her work draws attention to the need for increasing class and gender analysis in food studies, which Van Esterik undertakes in her study of how the commodification of infant food through the international marketing of infant formula has had severe economic and health consequences. Activists have constantly challenged the actions of transnational pharmaceutical and food companies promoting industrially processed baby foods. The addendum shows how current advocacy work must adapt to the new economic climate where conflicts of interest and public– private partnerships with food companies are the new normal.
Even food aid has been affected by the concentration of power in the hands of global food industries. Clapp shows how different African societies exercise their rights to limit the import of genetically modified foods even in the face of famine and extreme hunger. The lens of political economy provides fascinating insights into the current obsession with obesity, as Julier shows. Taking a critical functionalist approach, she shows who benefits from blaming the obese for their weight: the government, the diet food and supplement industries, bariatric medical practitioners, and exercise businesses. Blaming individuals for being obese draws attention away from the broader social and economic causes of obesity, including poverty, inadequate food distribution systems, and the excess of unhealthy food available to the poor.
Following the recession of 2008, hunger and food handouts have played an increasingly important role in North American communities. Poppendieck looks at the role of charity in combating food insecurity in the United States. While charity plays a critical role in temporarily abating hunger, it fails to address the poverty and structural inequality that are its real underlying causes (Berg 2008, Fitchen 1988, Lappé and Collins 1986, Patel 2007, Poppendieck 1998, Winne 2008). Priscilla McCutcheon provides another approach to hunger in examining community empowerment through food in her study of two black nationalist religious organizations—one Christian and the other, the Nation of Islam. Her research brings out the complex entanglements of food and racial identity in the American south where self-reliance in food production offered a means to address both hunger and black identity. Charles Levkoe’s prize-winning student essay on “Learning Food Democracy through Food Justice Movements” concludes the section and the Reader with more examples of successful community organization around food issues. As a form of adult education that promotes engagement with democratic values, the food justice movement in Canada brings together a wide range of food activists who act not simply as food consumers, but as citizens who advocate for changes in food policy.
Food is a particularly powerful lens on capital, labor, health, and the environment. Taken together, these papers force us to re-examine the interconnections between the availability of cheap food in North America and the conditions of its production in other parts of the world. Food advocacy is a growing arena for political activism, as the success of Italy’s Slow Food Movement shows. Food unites all humans; its lack strikes a painful chord among haves and have-nots alike. Progress towards social justice can only come through a concerted effort on the part of social activists everywhere to end world hunger and bring about universal access to nutritious and adequate food.
Throughout the five sections of the reader, several themes emerge that can structure how readers approach the book. Theory and method constitute one important theme. While all of the articles are embedded in theory, some explicitly identify theoretical positions: semiotic (Barthes), structuralist (Lévi-Strauss), symbolic (Douglas), materialist (Harris), Marxist (Clark), critical functionalist (Julier), and liberal, advocacy, corporeal, and Third-World feminist (Bordo, Counihan, Slocum, Van Esterik, Williams-Forson).
Articles also employ different methodologies, providing readers with a wealth of information about the different means of investigating the role of food in history and culture. A number of articles use ethnographic approaches; for example, Allison, Carrington, Sutton, and Yan use interviews and participant-observation, and Counihan uses food-centered life histories.9 Analysis of cultural symbols and meanings is employed by Douglas and Bordo, the former from an anthropological and the latter from a philosophical perspective. Nabhan uses methods of ethnobotany, and Yasmeen of geography, while Bynum, McCutcheon, and Williams-Forson employ fine-grained historical research, and Srinivas, Sutton, and Williams-Forson examine the material culture of food. Holden, Parasecoli, and Swenson analyze the mass media, while several articles analyze restaurants including fast-food and fancy ones in China (Yan), Taco Bell in Mexico (Pilcher), pizza restaurants in Japan (Ceccarini), and street stalls in Thailand (Yasmeen). Together, these articles provide readers with a rich sampling of diverse theories, approaches, and methods to inspire their own research.
Another cross-cutting theme is food as a means of communication. Because of food’s multi-sensorial properties of taste, touch, sight, sound, and smell, it has the ability to communicate in a variety of registers and constitutes a form of language (Barthes). Definitions of acceptable and prohibited foods (Lévi-Strauss, Douglas, Harris), stereotypes associating certain groups with certain foods (Williams-Forson), consumption of foods to express belonging (Clark, Heldke) or attain desired states (Parasecoli, Yan), and use of food narratives to speak about the self (Counihan) are all ways that food communicates.
New forms of communication include information technology and social media. Papers on social media are quickly outdated, as technology and apps change quickly. However, future research will no doubt address the incredible opportunity presented by research in cyberspace. What are the implications of people sharing on Facebook every detail about a just-consumed meal, or of dieters using a smart phone app to instantly document the calories and nutritional content of the dish they are about to eat, or of friends living in different parts of the world sharing a meal in cyberspace? Is this really commensality when eaters watch each other eating the same meal? Photographs shared quickly on social media can provide instant evidence of food safety violations or advertising that “breaks the rules,” such as inappropriate ads directed to children, false health claims for specific foods, or promotions advertising infant formula. These images can be sent to food activists quickly, and possibly be addressed just as quickly both by activists and food corporations.
Food as an index of power relations is another significant theme in several articles. Hierarchy and oppression are themes in Williams-Forson’s paper on African American women’s contested relationship with chicken, Counihan’s exploration of differential consciousness among rural Mexicanas, and Barndt’s and Schlosser’s examination of the exploitation of workers. Complex global power dynamics are explored in different ways in Mintz’s treatise on the growth of the sugar industry, Van Esterik’s analysis of breast vs. bottle feeding of infants, and Heldke’s examination of first world consumers’ “adventure cooking and eating.” Julier addresses how the excoriation of the obese serves to maintain economic and ideological hegemony of elites, while Clark shows how punks explicitly challenge the power of the agroindustrial food system in their veganism and dumpster diving. Many other articles engage with issues of power in the food economy, ideology, and politics.
Access to food is at the heart of food security and human rights, and its denial is a terrible measure of human powerlessness, an issue addressed in different ways by Nabhan’s examination of Native Americans’ degraded health, Poppendieck’s insightful study of food charity, and McCutcheon’s examination of Nation of Islam community feeding programs. With the increasing commodification and globalization of food, power issues are revealed not only in access to food but also in the production of local, culturally meaningful foods whose endurance is key to cultural survival, as Wilk, Nabhan, Leitch, Pilcher, and Clapp demonstrate (see Van Esterik 2006b). Integrating the cultural dimensions of food and eating with the legal discourse on human rights is an ongoing challenge of great significance that Ellen Messer’s work addresses (Messer 2004, Messer and Cohen 2008).
The questions we raised at the end of the second edition are worth asking again, as they still deserve the attention of food researchers. What is it about food that makes it an especially intriguing and insightful lens of analysis? What questions about foodways still need to be addressed? How have food regimes changed through time? How does the universal need for food bind individuals and groups together? What are the most serious problems in the global food system and what causes them? What political, economic, social, and ideological structures enhance food sovereignty and social justice, and what structures contribute to inequitable food systems?
1. Some recent articles on food and film are Baron 2003, Johnson 2002, Van Esterik 2006a.
2. Two insightful articles on food and human rights are Bellows 2003, Van Esterik 1999b. 3. M.F.K. Fisher (1954, 1961, 1983) is one of the most lyrical food writers who has inspired countless others.
4. The development of research interests in food in anthropology is as old as the discipline. Early anthropologists recognized the central role of food in different cultures, most notably Audrey Richards (1932, 1939), but also Raymond Firth (1934), Bronislaw Malinowski (1935), M. and S.L. Fortes (1936), and Cora DuBois (1941). Anthropology continues to make important contributions—both ethnographic and theoretical—to the field today. Some influential books on the anthropology of food are Anderson 1988, 2005, Counihan 1999, 2004, Dettwyler 1994, Fink 1998, Goody 1982, Kahn 1986, Kulick and Meneley 2005, Meigs 1984, Mintz 1985, 1997, Nichter 2000, Ohnuki-Tierney 1993, Pollock 1992, Watson 1997, Weismantel 1988, Wilk 2006a, 2006b.
5. See Spang (1988) on anthropologists’ work on food during World War II.
6. On the complex relationship between gender, cooking, and power, see Avakian 1997, Avakian and Haber 2005, Charles and Kerr 1988, Counihan 2004, DeVault 1991, Inness 2001a, 2001b, 2001c, Van Esterik 1996, 1997, 1999a, Williams-Forson 2006, and Witt 1999.
7. Some books that examine the religious and ideological dimensions of fasting and dieting are Adams 1990, Bell 1987, Brumberg 1988, Bynum 1987, Griffith 2004, Sack 2005, and Vandereycken and Van Deth 1994.
8. The following are influential studies of women’s food restriction: Bruch 1973, 1978, Brumberg 1988, Nichter 2000, Thompson 1994.
9. Often food and eating become critically important parts of ethnographic fieldwork, even when the research did not originally focus on food (cf. Coleman 2011).
Abarca, Meredith. 2006. Voices in the Kitchen: Views of Food and the World from Working-Class Mexican and Mexican
American Women. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.
Adams, Carol. 1990. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum. Albala, Ken. 2007a. The Banquet: Dining in the Great Courts of Late Renaissance Europe. Champagne-Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Albala, Ken. 2007b. Beans: A History. Oxford: Berg.
Anderson, E. N. 1988. The Food of China. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Anderson, E. N. 2005. Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture. New York: NYU Press.
Appelbaum, Robert. 2006. Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Avakian, Arlene Voski, ed. 1997. Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking. Boston: Beacon.
Avakian, Arlene Voski and Barbara Haber, eds. 2005. From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies: Critical Perspectives on Women and Food. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
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