Margaret Mead

This piece questions attitudes towards food and eating in a world where food is overabundant and we face the ambiguity of overindulgence and guilt.

Roland Barthes

French structuralists explain how food acts as a system of communication and provides a body of images that mark eating situations.

Pierre Bourdieu

Bourdieu addresses differences between taste of luxury and taste of necessity through his theory of class distinction.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

This classic structuralist statement, often critiqued, shows how food preparation can be analyzed as a triangular semantic field, much like language.

Mary Douglas

Douglas applies structural analysis to the establishment of religious dietary rules as a means to develop self-control, distinction, and a sense of belonging based on the construction of holiness.

Marvin Harris

Materialists like Harris reject symbolic and structuralist explanations and explain food prohibitions based on economic and ecological utility.

Jack Goody

The early industrialization of food processing was made possible by advancements in preservation, mechanization, marketing, and transport of food items. These advancements also separated urban and rural societies from food manufacturing.

Sidney W. Mintz

Colonialism made high-status sugar produced in the Caribbean into a working class staple.

Hegemony and Difference: Race, class and gender

Psyche Williams-Forson

Ethnographic, historical, and literary research reveals not only controlling and damaging stereotypes about African Americans and chicken but also the ways Black women have used chicken as a form of resistance and community survival.

T.J.M. Holden

Cooking shows featuring male chefs predominate on Japanese television and propagate one-dimensional definitions of masculinity based on power, authority, and ownership of consumer commodities.

Rebecca Swenson

Swenson analyzes how the programs of The Food Network manifest gender stereotypes while also providing an avenue for challenging ideas of male and female roles regarding food.

Anne Allison

Japanese mothers, in preparing elaborate lunch-boxes for their preschool children, reproduce state ideologies of power.

Carole Counihan

Food-centered life histories portray the voices and perspectives of traditionally muted Hispanic women of rural southern Colorado whose food stories reveal differential behaviors and consciousness which promote empowerment.

Christopher Carrington

Because feeding work is complex, laborious, and highly gendered, it is problematic in lesbigay families because a full accounting of it would destroy illusions of equality and call into question masculinity of gay men who do it and femininity of lesbians who do not.

Rachel Slocum

By applying feminist materialist theory Slocum analyses the embodiment of race and its manifestations through food practices and behavior displayed at the farmers’ market.

Dylan Clark

Punk cuisine – based on scavenged, rotten, and/or stolen food – challenges the hierarchy, commodification, toxicity, and environmental destruction of the capitalist food system.

Consumption and Embodiment

Caroline Bynum

Medieval women used food for personal religious expression, including giving food away, exuding foods from their bodies, and undertaking fasts to gain religious and cultural power.

Susan Bordo

Bordo argues that eating disorders and body image issues are created through social and media pressures that target all women regardless of race or class.

Richard O’ Connor

This paper offers a biocultural approach to anorexia that stresses how young people obsess not over beauty but over an ascetic search for self-control.

Fabio Parasecoli

Men’s fitness magazines define masculinity through discussions of food and body, increasingly involving men in concerns about constructing corporeal perfection and regulating consumption to build muscle and strength.

David Sutton

Practical knowledge of food preparation is an embodied skill that uses all the senses. Standardization of modern food practices affects the social dimensions of this type of experiential learning.

Gisèle Yasmeen

The urban phenomenon of public eating in Thailand is a reflection of changes in gender, labor, and household dynamics in a (post)industrial food system.

Gary Paul Nabhan

Skyrocketing adult-onset diabetes among desert dwelling Seri Indians of Northern Mexico suggests that changes in diet have caused this major health problem and that traditional desert foods – especially legumes, cacti, and acorns – are protective.

Robert Albritton

Political economists identify how the industrial food system manipulates the price of commodity goods in order to shape the diet of Americans. This global capitalist food system with its cheap and addictive foods promotes both hunger and obesity.

Food and Globalization

Tulasi Srinivas

This article examines the growing consumption of packaged foods by middle-class South Asian Indians in Bangalore and Boston and focuses on the relationship between authenticity, meanings of motherhood, and definitions of the family.

Richard Wilk

Transformations in Belizean food from colonial times to the present demonstrate transnational political, economic and culinary influences that have affected the ways Belizean people define themselves and their nation.

Lisa Heldke

Cultural food colonialism is reproduced by food adventurers who seek out ethnic foods to satisfy their taste for the exotic other.

Alison Leitch

This chapter provides a brief history of the Slow Food movement’s politics and controversies.

Jeffrey M. Pilcher

The case of Mexico highlights challenges to the program of Italy’s Slow Food Movement which offers strategies for the maintenance of traditional, local, and sustainable Mexican food but which does not address problems of class and food access.

Rossella Ceccarini

This chapter examines globalization of food through a case study of pizza in Japan through the transnational experiences of Japanese and Italian pizza chefs.

Yungxiang Yan

In Beijing, Chinese consumers localize fast food by linking it to being American and being modern. They enjoy the standardization of meals, the hospitable service, the democratic environment, and the cleanliness, which create a desirable space to socialize and linger.

Deborah Barndt

The neoliberal model of production has contributed to the feminization of labor and poverty as told through the stories of two Mexican and one Canadian worker forced to adapt to the flexibility of labor in the global food system.

Challenging, Contesting, and Transforming the Food System

Eric Schlosser

The mistreatment of meatpacking workers in the United States is linked to the high rates of trauma in this dangerous industry and reveals general problems of corporate food production.

Julie Guthman

This article examines salad greens to study the development of modern organic food production, its roots in the counter culture movement of the 1960’s, and its transformation into a gentrified commodity reserved for a privileged niche market.

Penny Van Esterik

The commodification of baby food has had severe consequences, but advocacy groups actively resist the promotional tactics of transnational food and pharmaceutical companies.

Jennifer Clapp

The advent of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has seriously affected food aid, even in the context of famine and extreme hunger.

Alice Julier

The culture-wide denigration of the "obesity epidemic" is not only due to its health consequences, but also to the political and economic benefits to the food corporations, the diet industry, and the health professions.

Janet Poppendieck

Because of great need, many U.S. volunteers feed the hungry, but charity not only fails to solve the underlying causes of hunger – poverty and inequality – but contributes to it by offering token rather than structural solutions and taking the government off the hook.

Priscilla McCutcheon

McCutcheon looks at Black Nationalist religious organizations that aim to achieve racial self-reliance through community food movements.