Agriculture's Ethical Horizon by
What are the goals of agricultural science? What should the goals of agricultural science be? How do and how should the practitioners of agriculture address complex ethical questions? These questions are explored in this monumental book so that those in agriculture will begin an open dialoge on the ethics of agriculture. Discussion of foundational values, of why we practice agriculture as we do, should become a central, rather than peripheral, part of agricultural practice and education.
Food History Almanac by
The Food History Almanac, covering 365 days of the year, is chock full of information and anecdotes relating to food history from around the world from medieval times to the present.
Food in Time and Place by
Food and cuisine are important subjects for historians across many areas of study. Food, after all, is one of the most basic human needs and a foundational part of social and cultural histories. Such topics as famines, food supply, nutrition, and public health are addressed by historians specializing in every era and every nation. Food in Time and Place delivers an unprecedented review of the state of historical research on food, endorsed by the American Historical Association, providing readers with a geographically, chronologically, and topically broad understanding of food cultures-from ancient Mediterranean and medieval societies to France and its domination of haute cuisine. Teachers, students, and scholars in food history will appreciate coverage of different thematic concerns, such as transfers of crops, conquest, colonization, immigration, and modern forms of globalization.
Food Words: essays in culinary culture by
Food Words is a series of provocative essays on some of the most important keywords in the emergent field of food studies, focusing on current controversies and on-going debates. Words like 'choice' and 'convenience' are often used as explanatory terms in understanding consumer behavior but are clearly ideological in the way they reflect particular positions and serve specific interests, while words like 'taste' and 'value' are no less complex and contested. Inspired by Raymond Williams, Food Words traces the multiple meanings of each of our keywords, tracking nuances in different (academic, commercial and policy) contexts. Mapping the dynamic meanings of each term, the book moves forward from critical assessment to active intervention -- an attitude that is reflected in the lively, sometimes combative, style of the essays. Each essay is research-based and fully referenced but accessible to the general reader. With a foreword by eminent food scholar Warren Belasco, Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland-Baltmore County, and written by an inter-disciplinary team associated with the CONANX research project (Consumer culture in an 'age of anxiety'), Food Words will be essential reading for food scholars across the arts, humanities and social sciences
From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express by
From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express takes readers on a compelling journey from the California Gold Rush to the present, letting readers witness both the profusion of Chinese restaurants across the United States and the evolution of many distinct American-Chinese iconic dishes from chop suey to General Tso's chicken. Along the way, historian Haiming Liu explains how the immigrants adapted their traditional food to suit local palates, and gives readers a taste of Chinese cuisine embedded in the bittersweet story of Chinese Americans. Treating food as a social history, Liu explores why Chinese food changed and how it has influenced American culinary culture, and how Chinese restaurants have become places where shared ethnic identity is affirmed-not only for Chinese immigrants but also for American Jews. The book also includes a look at national chains like P. F. Chang's and a consideration of how Chinese food culture continues to spread around the globe. Drawing from hundreds of historical and contemporary newspaper reports, journal articles, and writings on food in both English and Chinese, From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express represents a groundbreaking piece of scholarly research. It can be enjoyed equally as a fascinating set of stories about Chinese migration, cultural negotiation, race and ethnicity, diverse flavored Chinese cuisine and its share in American food market today.
Planet Taco by
Introduction: A Tale of Two Tacos -- Part I. Proto-Tacos -- Maize and the Making of Mexico -- Burritos in the Borderlands -- Part II. National Tacos -- From the Pastry War to Parisian Mole -- The Rise and Fall of the Chili Queens -- Inventing the Mexican American Taco -- Part III. Global Tacos -- The First Wave of Global Mexican -- The Blue Corn Bonanza -- Conclusion: The Battle of the Taco Trucks -- Glossary.
Quick and Easy: Origin and Meanings of Fast Food by
Food, no matter of what kind, is a substance required for survival. Stripped of any cultural meanings, it is a primary means of biological nourishment and sustenance. But in a cultural context, the types of food, how they are eaten, what social rituals are involved in etiquette, and so on, take on a greater value. In other words, outside of a survival context, food is much more than substance for ensuring such survival. It constitutes a meaning system imbued with subtle unconscious cultural connotations of all kinds. We eat, first and foremost, to survive. But in a social ambiance, food takes on significance that transcends this biological function, affecting even our perceptions of edibility. In America, we do not normally eat insects, by and large, even though they would provide nourishment. We do not eat them because of the negative perceptions and emotions we have projected onto insects. In other cultures, insects are often considered to be a delicacy. Clearly, food tastes are cultural tastes. So, where does the fast food phenomenon fit into this line of reasoning, given that it seems to go against historically-based cultural systems of meaning? This book will attempt to answer this question by examining the origin, evolution and meanings of the fast food phenomenon, from its neurological and social meanings to its recreational ones. Does the contemporary penchant for fast food exist in the brain, or is it a fabrication of a consumerist culture gone insane, as the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy so eloquently and satirically emphasized? Much has been written about the phenomenon of fast food, given the importance of eating to health and cultural identity. The goal in this book is to go in a slightly different, but hopefully significant, direction; namely, to examine the meanings of fast food in relation to the birth and spread of mass consumerist society, and its role in future societies. Fast food originated in amusement and circus culture, but it soon spread to society via urbanization, the automobile, and the need for “quick and easy” solutions to almost everything, including the preparation and eating of food. The book argues that, in the end, we are what we have made ourselves to be. Fast food is of our own making, not something imposed cleverly by some master capitalist plan. We eat it because it is tasty and easily prepared. The cultural meanings of fast food might even be intertwined with an innate pleasure principle, into which fast foods seem to tap rather effectively. Above all else, fast food is a mirror of the contemporary world's penchant for a quick-and-easy approach to virtually everything, for better or worse. Given its proliferation to all sectors and levels of society, fast food has changed the social paradigm of eating everywhere. The book will conclude by assessing what the implications of this paradigm for the future are.
The Bloomsbury Handbook of Food and Popular Culture by
The influence of food has grown rapidly as it has become more and more intertwined with popular culture in recent decades. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Food and Popular Culture offers an authoritative, comprehensive overview of and introduction to this growing field of research. Bringing together over 20 original essays from leading experts, including Amy Bentley, Deborah Lupton, Fabio Parasecoli, and Isabelle de Solier, its impressive breadth and depth serves to define the field of food and popular culture. Divided into four parts, the book covers: - Media and Communication; including film, television, print media, the Internet, and emerging media - Material Cultures of Eating; including eating across the lifespan, home cooking, food retail, restaurants, and street food - Aesthetics of Food; including urban landscapes, museums, visual and performance arts - Socio-Political Considerations; including popular discourses around food science, waste, nutrition, ethical eating, and food advocacy Each chapter outlines key theories and existing areas of research whilst providing historical context and considering possible future developments. The Editors'Introduction by Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato, ensures cohesion and accessibility throughout. A truly interdisciplinary, ground-breaking resource, this book makes an invaluable contribution to the study of food and popular culture. It will be an essential reference work for students, researchers and scholars in food studies, film and media studies, communication studies, sociology, cultural studies, and American studies.
Diners, Dudes, and Diets: how gender and power collide in food media and culture by
In a work brimming with fresh insights about contemporary American food media and culture, Emily Contois shows how the gendered world of food production and consumption has influenced the way we eat and how food itself is central to the contest over our identities.
Edible Ideologies : representing food and meaning by
Introduction / Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato -- Ch. 1. Men and menus : Dickens and the rise of the "ordinary" English gentleman / Annette Cozzi -- Ch. 2. "Food will win the war" : food and social control in World War I propaganda / Celia M. Kingsbury -- Ch. 3. Cooking in memory's kitchen : re-presenting recipes, remembering the Holocaust / Marie I. Drews -- Ch. 4. "More than one million mothers know it's the REAL thing" : the Rosenbergs, Jell-O, old-fashioned gefilte fish, and 1950s America / Nathan Abrams -- Ch. 5. Cooking the books : Jewish cuisine and the commodification of difference / Eric Mason -- Ch. 6. Typisch Deutsch : culinary tourism and the presentation of German food in English-language travel guides / Lynne Fallwell -- Ch. 7. The embodied rhetoric of "health" from farm fields to salad bowls / Jean P. Retzinger -- Ch. 8. Consuming the other : packaged representations of foreignness in President's choice / Charlene Elliott -- Ch. 9. From romance to PMS : images of women and chocolate in twentieth-century America / Kathleen Banks Nutter -- Ch. 10. Julia Child, Martha Stewart, and the rise of culinary capital / Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato
Every Nation Has Its Dish: black bodies and black food in twentieth-century america by
This text gives a nuanced history of black foodways across the twentieth century, challenging traditional narratives of 'soul food' as a singular style of historical African American cuisine. It details the experiences and diverse convictions of several generations of African American activists, ranging from Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois to Mary Church Terrell, Elijah Muhammad, and Dick Gregory.
Food Is Culture by
Elegantly written by a distinguished culinary historian, Food Is Culture explores the innovative premise that everything having to do with food& mdash;its capture, cultivation, preparation, and consumption& mdash;represents a cultural act. Even the ""choices"" made by primitive hunters and gatherers were determined by a culture of economics (availability) and medicine (digestibility and nutrition) that led to the development of specific social structures and traditions.
Sustainability: integrating agriculture, environment, and renewable energy for food security by
This book has the ambition of presenting sustainability issues in a simple way to students in the field of agriculture and the environment. There is much diversity in the viewpoints on the meaning of sustainability. Sustainability must be made operational in each specific context and scaled, and appropriate methods must be designed to achieve long-term goals for the environment, agriculture, energy and food security. The ultimate goal of the environment and agriculture is protecting soil and water to ensure food security for the growing population.
You Are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate by
You are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate offers tantalizing essays immersed in the culture of food, expanded across genres, disciplines, and time. The entire collection of You Are What You Eat includes a diversity of approaches and foci from multicultural national and international scholars and has a broad spectrum of subjects including: feminist theory, domesticity, children, film, cultural history, patriarchal gender ideology, mothering ideology, queer theory, politics, and poetry.
Food, Politics, and Society: Social Theory and the Modern Food System by
Food and drink has been a focal point of modern social theory since the inception of agrarian capitalism and the industrial revolution. From Adam Smith to Mary Douglas, major thinkers have used key concepts such as identity, exchange, culture, and class to explain the modern food system. Food, Politics, and Society offers a historical and sociological survey of how these various ideas and the practices that accompany them have shaped our understanding and organization of the production, processing, preparation, serving, and consumption of food and drink in modern societies. Divided into twelve chapters and drawing on a wide range of historical and empirical illustrations, this book provides a concise, informed, and accessible survey of the interaction between social theory and food and drink. It is perfect for courses in a wide range of disciplines.
Food Culture: anthropology, linguistics and food studies by
This volume offers a comprehensive guide to methods used in the sociocultural, linguistic and historical research of food use. This volume is unique in offering food-related research methods from multiple academic disciplines, and includes methods that bridge disciplines to provide a thorough review of best practices. In each chapter, a case study from the author's own work is to illustrate why the methods were adopted in that particular case along with abundant additional resources to further develop and explore the methods.
Food in American culture and literature : places at the table by
Carving a unique space within the burgeoning field of food studies, the essays gathered in this volume position themselves at a variety of flashpoints along the spectrum of cultural and literary analysis.
Fruit from the Sands: The Silk Road Origins of the Foods We Eat by
The foods we eat have a deep and often surprising past. From almonds and apples to tea and rice, many foods that we consume today have histories that can be traced out of prehistoric Central Asia along the tracks of the Silk Road to kitchens in Europe, America, China, and elsewhere in East Asia. The exchange of goods, ideas, cultural practices, and genes along these ancient routes extends back five thousand years, and organized trade along the Silk Road dates to at least Han Dynasty China in the second century BC. Balancing a broad array of archaeological, botanical, and historical evidence, Fruit from the Sands presents the fascinating story of the origins and spread of agriculture across Inner Asia and into Europe and East Asia. Through the preserved remains of plants found in archaeological sites, Robert N. Spengler III identifies the regions where our most familiar crops were domesticated and follows their routes as people carried them around the world. With vivid examples, Fruit from the Sands explores how the foods we eat have shaped the course of human history and transformed cuisines all over the globe.
Global Jewish Foodways: a history by
An exploration of the many facets of the global history of Jewish food when Jews struggled with, embraced, modified, or rejected the foods and foodways which surrounded them, from Renaissance Italy to the post-World War II era in Israel, Argentina and the United States
Live, Die, Buy, Eat: Cultural History of Animals and Meat by
Live, Die, Buy, Eat. These words represent a chain of events which today is disconnected. In the past few years, controversies around meat have arisen around industrialization and globalization of meat production, often pivoting around health, environmental issues, and animal welfare. Although meat increasingly figures as a problem, most consumers' knowledge of animal husbandry and meat production is more absent than ever. Tracing a historical process of alienation along three distinct axes, the authors show how the animal origin of meat is covered up, rationalized, forgotten, excused, neglected, and denied. How is meat produced today, and where? How do we consume meat, and how have our consumption habits changed? Why have these changes occurred, and what are the social and cultural consequences of these changes? Using Norway as a case study, this book examines the dramatic changes in meat production and consumption over the last 150 years. With a wide range of historical sources, together with interviews and observation at farms, slaughterhouses, and production units, as well as analyses of contemporary texts and digital sources, Live, Die, Buy, Eat explores the transformation of animal husbandry, meat production and consumption, together with its cultural consequences. It will appeal to scholars of anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, geography, and history with an interest in food, agriculture, environment, and culture.
Tasting Difference: Food, Race, and Cultural Encounters in Early Modern Literature by
Tasting Difference examines early modern discourses of racial, cultural, and religious difference that emerged in wake of contact with foreign peoples and exotic foods from across the globe. Gitanjali Shahani reimagines the contact zone between Western Europe and the Global South in culinary terms, emphasizing the gut rather than the gaze in colonial encounters. From household manuals that instructed English housewives how to use newly inported foodstuffs, to "the spiced Indian air" of Midsummer Night's Dream, to the repurposing of Othello as an early modern pitchman for coffee in ballads, to the performance of disgust in travel narratives, Shahani shows how early modern genres negotiated the allure and danger of foreign tastes.Turning maxims such as, "we are what we eat" on their head, Shahani asks how did we (the colonized subjects), become what you (the colonizing subjects) eat? How did we become alternately the object of fear and appetite, loathing and craving? Seeking answers to these questions, Shahani takes us back several centuries, to the process by which food came to be inscribed with racial character and the racial other came to be marked as edible, showing how the racializing of food began in an era well before chicken tikka masala and balti cuisine.Bringing into conversation critical paradigms in early modern studies, food studies, and postcolonial studies. she argues that it is in the writing on food and eating that we see among the earliest configurations of racial difference and it is experienced both as a different taste and as a taste of difference.
Word of Mouth: What We Talk About When We Talk About Food by
Today, more than ever, talking about food improves the eating of it. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson argues that conversation can even trump consumption. Where many works look at the production, preparation, and consumption of food, Word of Mouth captures the language that explains culinary practices. Explanation is more than an elaboration here: how we talk about food says a great deal about the world around us and our place in it. What does it mean, Ferguson asks, to cook and consume in a globalized culinary world subject to vertiginous change? Answers to this question demand a mastery of food talk in all its forms and applications. To prove its case, Word of Mouth draws on a broad range of cultural documents from interviews, cookbooks, and novels to comic strips, essays, and films. Although the United States supplies the primary focus of Ferguson's explorations, the French connection remains vital. American food culture comes of age in dialogue with French cuisine even as it strikes out on its own. In the twenty-first century, culinary modernity sets haute food against haute cuisine, creativity against convention, and the individual dish over the communal meal. Ferguson finds a new level of sophistication in what we thought that we already knew: the real pleasure in eating comes through knowing how to talk about it.