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.

This comprehensive reference work introduces food culture from more than 150 countries and cultures around the world—including some from remote and unexpected peoples and places. From babka to baklava to the groundnut stew of Ghana, food culture can tell us where we've been—and maybe even where we're going. Filled with succinct, yet highly informative entries, the four-volume Food Cultures of the World Encyclopedia covers all of the planet's nation-states, as well as various tribes and marginalized peoples. Thus, in addition to coverage on countries as disparate as France, Ethiopia, and Tibet, there are also entries on Roma Gypsies, the Maori of New Zealand, and the Saami of northern Europe. There is even a section on food in outer space, detailing how and what astronauts eat and how they prepare for space travel as far as diet and nutrition are concerned. Each entry offers information about foodstuffs, meals, cooking methods, recipes, eating out, holidays and celebrations, and health and diet. Vignettes help readers better understand other cultures, while the inclusion of selected recipes lets them recreate dishes from other lands.

Cookbooks. Menus. Ingredients. Dishes. Pots. Kitchens. Markets. Museum exhibitions. These objects, representations, and environments are part of what the volume calls the material cultures of food. The book features leading scholars, professionals, and chefs who apply a material cultural perspective to consider two relatively unexplored questions: 1) What is the material culture of food? and 2) How are frameworks, concepts, and methods of material culture used in scholarly research and professional practice? This book acknowledges that materiality is historically and culturally specific (local), but also global, as food both transcends and collapses geographical and ideological borders. Contributors capture the malleability of food, its material environments and “stuff,” and its representations in media, museums, and marketing, while following food through cycles of production, circulation, and consumption. As many of the featured authors explore, food and its many material and immaterial manifestations not only reflect social issues, but also actively produce, preserve, and disrupt identities, communities, economic systems, and everyday social practices. The volume includes contributions from and interviews with a dynamic group of scholars, museum and information professionals, and chefs who represent diverse disciplines, such as communication studies, anthropology, history, American studies, folklore, and food studies.

Food is not only something we eat, it is something we use to define ourselves. This title considers the ways in which popular culture reveals our relationship with food and our own bodies and how these have become an arena for political and ideological ba.

This volume explores our cultural celebration of food, blending lobster festivals, politicians' roadside eats, reality show "chef showdowns," and gravity-defying cakes into a deeper exploration of why people find so much joy in eating. In 1961, Julia Child introduced the American public to an entirely new, joy-infused approach to cooking and eating food. In doing so, she set in motion a food renaissance that is still in full bloom today. Over the last six decades, food has become an increasingly more diverse, prominent, and joyful point of cultural interest. The Joy of Eating discusses in detail the current golden age of food in contemporary American popular culture. Entries explore the proliferation of food-themed television shows, documentaries, and networks; the booming popularity of celebrity chefs; unusual, exotic, decadent, creative, and even mundane food trends; and cultural celebrations of food, such as in festivals and music. The volume provides depth and academic gravity by tying each entry into broader themes and larger contexts (in relation to a food-themed reality show, for example, discussing the show's popularity in direct relation to a significant economic event), providing a brief history behind popular foods and types of cuisines and tracing the evolution of our understanding of diet and nutrition, among other explications.

The last 20 years have seen a burgeoning of social scientific and historical research on food. The field has drawn in experts to investigate topics such as: the way globalisation affects the food supply; what cookery books can (and cannot) tell us; changing understandings of famine; the social meanings of meals - and many more. Now sufficiently extensive to require a critical overview, this is the first handbook of specially commissioned essays to provide a tour d'horizon of this broad range of topics and disciplines. The editors have enlisted eminent researchers across the social sciences to illustrate the debates, concepts and analytic approaches of this widely diverse and dynamic field. This volume will be essential reading, a ready-to-hand reference book surveying the state of the art for anyone involved in, and actively concerned about research on the social, political, economic, psychological, geographic and historical aspects of food. It will cater for all who need to be informed of research that has been done and that is being done.

This book offers an exploration of the comprehensive impact of the events of September 11, 2001, on every aspect of American culture and society. On Thanksgiving day after September 11, 2001, comic strip creators directed readers to donate money in their artwork, generating $50,000 in relief funds. The world's largest radio network, Clear Channel, sent a memo to all of its affiliated stations recommending 150 songs that should be eliminated from airplay because of assumptions that their lyrics would be perceived as offensive in light of the events of 9/11. On the first anniversary of September 11th, choirs around the world performed Mozart's Requiem at 8:46 am in each time zone, the time of the first attack on the World Trade Center. These examples are just three of the ways the world—but especially the United States—responded to the events of September 11, 2001. Each chapter in this book contains a chronological overview of the sea of changes in everyday life, literature, entertainment, news and media, and visual culture after September 11. Shorter essays focus on specific books, TV shows, songs, and films.