Why Food Matters

What is food and why does it matter? Bringing together the most innovative, cutting-edge scholarship and debates, this reader provides an excellent introduction to the rapidly growing discipline of food studies. Covering a wide range of theoretical perspectives and disciplinary approaches, it challenges common ideas about food and identifies emerging trends which will define the field for years to come.A fantastic resource for both teaching and learning, the book features:- a comprehensive introduction to the text and to each of the five parts, providing a clear, accessible overview and ensuring a coherent thematic focus throughout- thirty articles on topics that are guaranteed to engage student interest, including molecular gastronomy, lab-grown meat and other futurist foods, microbiopolitics, healthism and nutritionism, food safety, ethics, animal welfare, fair trade, and much more- discussion questions and suggestions for further reading which help readers to think further about the issues raised, reinforcing understanding and learning.Edited by Melissa L. Caldwell, one of the leaders in the field, Why d Matters is the essential textbook for courses in food studies, anthropology of food, sociology, geography, and related subjects.

Vorwort
This book is an essential introduction to food studies for students at all levels.

Autorentext

Melissa L. Caldwell is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, USA. She was also the sole editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies until 2019.

Inhalt

Editor's Acknowledgments

Permissions

Introduction: Why Does Food Matter?

Part 1: Revaluing Food in a Global Economy

Part 1 Introduction

1. Julie Guthman, "Willing (White) Workers on Organic Farms? Reflections on Volunteer Farm Labor and the Politics of Precarity"

2. Micah Marie Trapp, "Grocery Auction Games: Distribution and Value in the Industrialized Food System"

3. Sarah Besky, "The Labor of Terroir and the Terroir of Labor: Geographical Indication and Darjeeling Tea Plantations"

4. Sandra Fahy, "Famine Talk"

5. David Evans, "Blaming the Consumer - Once Again: The Social and Material Contexts of Everyday Food Waste Practices in Some English Households"

6. Hanna Garth, "Alimentary Dignity: Defining a Decent Meal in Post-Soviet Cuban Household Cooking"

Part 2: The Power of Food: From Politics to Microbiopolitics

Part 2 Introduction

7. Richard Wilk, "Power at the Table: Food Fights and Happy Meals"

8. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn, "Postsocialist Spores: Disease, Bodies, and the State in the Republic of Georgia"

9. Jakob A. Klein, "Everyday Approaches to Food Safety in Kunming"

10. Melissa L. Caldwell, "Digestive Politics in Russia: Feeling the Sensorium beyond the Palate"

11. Anne Meneley, "Resistance is Fertile!"

Part 3: New Bodily Realities in a Techno-Science World

Part 3 Introduction

12. Emily Contois, "'Lose Like a Man': Gender and the Constraints of Self-Making in Weight Watchers Online"

13. Jessica Hardin, "Everyday Translation: Health Practitioners' Perspectives on Obesity and Metabolic Disorders in Samoa"

14. Emilia Sanabria, "Sensorial Pedagogies, Hungry Fat Cells and the Limits of Nutritional Health Education"

15. Anna Kirkland, "The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism"

16. Aya Hirata Kimura, "Who Defines Babies' 'Needs'?: The Scientization of Baby Food in Indonesia"

Part 4: More than Human, More than Food

Part 4 Introduction

17. Chika Watanabe, "Waste, Incorporated"

18. Anna Tsing, "Arts of Inclusion, or How to Love a Mushroom"

19. Katy Overstreet, "How to Taste Like a Cow: Cultivating Shared Sense in Wisconsin Dairy Worlds"

20. Carl DiSalvo, "Spectacles and Tropes: Speculative Design and Contemporary Food Cultures"
    Index