This volume offers new insights into food and culture. Food habits, preferences, and taboos are partially regulated by ecological and material factors - in other words, all food systems are structured and given particular functioning mechanisms by specific societies and cultures, either according to totemic, sacrificial, hygienic-rationalist, aesthetic, or other symbolic logics. This provides much "food for thought". The famous expression has never been so appropriate: not only do cultures develop unique practices for the production, treatment and consumption of food, but such practices inevitably end up affecting food-related aspects and spheres that are generally perceived as objectively and materially defined. This book explores such dynamics drawing on various theoretical approaches and analytical methodologies, thus enhancing the cultural reflection on food and, at the same time, helping us see how the study of food itself can help us understand better what we call "culture". It will be of interest to anthropologists, philosophers, semioticians and historians of food.

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Simona Stano is a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at the University of Turin (UNITO, Italy) and Visiting Researcher at New York University (NYU, US). She has been awarded a Marie Curie Global Fellowship for a research project (COMFECTION, 2019-2021) on the semiotic analysis of food communication. She also worked as Senior Researcher at the International Semiotics Institute (2015-2018) and as Visiting Researcher at the University of Toronto (2013), the University of Barcelona (2015-2016) and the Observatorio de la Alimentación (2015-2016). Dr. Stano deals mainly with semiotics of culture, food semiotics, body semiotics, and communication studies, and has published several papers, edited volumes (including special issues of top semiotic journals such as Semiotica and Lexia), and monographs (I sensi del cibo, Aracne, 2018; Eating the Other. Translations of the Culinary Code, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015) on these topics. Since 2020, she is the vice-Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Communication (CIRCe) of the University of Turin. 
Amy Bentley** is Professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. A historian with interests in the social, historical, and cultural contexts of food, she is the author of Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet (University of California Press, 2014), which was a finalist for a James Beard Award, and also winner of the ASFS Best Book Award. Other publications include Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (University of Illinois, 1998), A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Era (editor) (Berg, 2011), as well as articles on such diverse topics as ketchup in Reagan's America, the politics of southwestern cuisine, and a historiography of food riots. In addition to her work as a food historian, she's been involved in a wide range of food-related academic and applied projects, including as co-founder of the NYU Urban Farm Lab and the Experimental Cuisine Collective (2007-2016). The former Editor-in-Chief of Food, Culture, and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research (2013-2019), Bentley is co-editor of the book series Food in Modern History: Traditions and Innovations (Bloomsbury). 

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