In this volume, 11 scholars explore the role of ethnic food in American culture, with a particular focus on women. They argue that ethnic cooking represents both a source of sustenance and a complex form of communication.

In this volume, 11 scholars explore the role of ethnic food in American culture, with a particular focus on women. They argue that ethnic cooking represents both a source of sustenance and a complex form of communication.

This innovative and global best-seller helped establish food studies courses throughout the social sciences and humanities when it was first published in 1997. The fourth edition of Food and Culture contains favorite articles from earlier editions and several new pieces on food politics, globalism, agriculture, and race and gender identity.

Why are spicy cuisines characteristic of hot climates? Does our stomach or our brain tell us when it is time to eat? And how do we decide if bugs are food? Employing a learner-centered approach, this introduction to the psychological mechanisms of consumption engages readers with questions and cross-cultural examples to promote critical analysis and evidence-based comprehension. The discipline of psychology provides an important perspective to the study of eating, given the remarkable complexity of our food environments (including society and culture), eating habits, and relationships with food. As everything psychological is simultaneously biological, the role of evolutionary pressures and biopsychological forces are bases to explore complex processes within the book, such as sensation and perception, learning and cognition, and human development. The authors illuminate contemporary eating topics, including the scope and consequences of overnutrition, the aetiology of eating disorders, societal focus on dieting and body image, controversies in food policy, and culture-inspired cuisine. Supplemental resources and exercises are provided in a pedagogically-focused companion website.

American eating changed dramatically in the early twentieth century. As food production became more industrialized, nutritionists, home economists, and so-called racial scientists were all pointing Americans toward a newly scientific approach to diet. Food faddists were rewriting the most basic rules surrounding eating, while reformers were working to reshape the diets of immigrants and the poor. And by the time of World War I, the country's first international aid program was bringing moral advice about food conservation into kitchens around the country. In Modern Food, Moral Food, Helen Zoe Veit argues that the twentieth-century food revolution was fueled by a powerful conviction that Americans had a moral obligation to use self-discipline and reason, rather than taste and tradition, in choosing what to eat.

Inspired by the need for interpretations and critiques of the varied messages surrounding what and how we eat, Food, Feminisms, Rhetorics collects eighteen essays that demonstrate the importance of food and food-related practices as sites of scholarly study, particularly from feminist rhetorical perspectives. Contributors analyze messages about food and bodies—from what a person watches and reads to where that person shops—taken from sources mundane and literary, personal and cultural. This collection begins with analyses of the historical, cultural, and political implications of cookbooks and recipes; explores definitions of feminist food writing; and ends with a focus on bodies and cultures—both self-representations and representations of others for particular rhetorical purposes. The genres, objects, and practices contributors study are varied—from cookbooks to genre fiction, from blogs to food systems, from product packaging to paintings—but the overall message is the same: food and its associated practices are worthy of scholarly attention.

As Food Studies has grown into a well-established field, literary scholars have not fully addressed the prevalent themes of food, eating, and consumption in Chicana/o literature. Here, contributors propose food consciousness as a paradigm to examine the literary discourses of Chicana/o authors as they shift from the nation to the postnation.