This timely and engaging text offers students a social perspective on food, food practices, and the modern food system. It engages readers' curiosity by highlighting several paradoxes: how food is both mundane and sacred, reveals both distinction and conformity, and, in the contemporary global era, comes from everywhere but nowhere in particular. With a social constructionist framework, the book provides an empirically rich, multi-faceted, and coherent introduction to this fascinating field. Each chapter begins with a vivid case study, proceeds through a rich discussion of research insights, and ends with discussion questions and suggested resources. Chapter topics include food's role in socialization, identity, work, health and social change, as well as food marketing and the changing global food system. In synthesizing insights from diverse fields of social inquiry, the book addresses issues of culture, structure, and social inequality throughout. Written in a lively style, this book will be both accessible and revealing to beginning and intermediate students alike.

"Feminist Food Studies: Intersectional Perspectives is the first edited volume to bring intersectionality to bear on scholarship within the field of feminist food studies. The contributions offer interdisciplinary and varied theoretical, methodological, and topical engagements with intersectionality, thereby advancing the book's central premise: that critical feminist social theory is indispensable to changing the social and structural inequities that shape and are shaped by food. By building on the work of feminist food scholars, this volume not only expands feminist food studies as an important field of study in its own right, but it also calls on food studies scholars to tend to the ways that intersections of oppression and privilege impact their research and scholarship."--Provided by publisher.

Description: A Sociology of Food and Nutrition: The Social Appetite examines explores the socio-cultural, political, economic and philosophical facts influencing food production, distribution and consumption. This interdisciplinary text encourages students to question, reflect and apply their understanding of health and nutrition.The fourth edition explores current trends in the sociological study of food including alcohol consumption and production, world hunger and food labelling. Features: New chapters reflecting current trends: Chapter 3: Food Insecurity in Australian Households: From Charity to Entitlement Chapter 6: Food Labelling: An Information Battlefield Chapter 7: 'Cheaper and More Plentiful than in England': A History of Australian Food Chapter 12: A Historical Sociology of Wine Chapter 13: The Social Appetite for Alcohol,The expert author team systematically covers a wide range of topics prevalent in food and nutrition.The most comprehensive and up-to-date discussion of food and nutrition on the market.

"A classic text about the social study of food, this is the first English language edition of Jean-Pierre Poulain's seminal work. Tracing the history of food scholarship, The Sociology of Food provides an overview of sociological theory and its relevance to the field of food. Divided into two parts, Poulain begins by exploring the continuities and changes in the modern diet. From the effect of globalization on food production and supply, to evolving cultural responses to food - including cooking and eating practices, the management of consumer anxieties, and concerns over obesity and the medicalization of food - the first part examines how changing food practices have shaped and are shaped by wider social trends. The second part provides an overview of the emergence of food as an academic focus for sociologists and anthropologists. Revealing the obstacles that lay in the way of this new field of study, Poulain shows how the discipline was first established and explains its development over the last forty years. Destined to become a key text for students and scholars, The Sociology of Food makes a major contribution to food studies and sociology. This edition features a brand new chapter and preface, specifically written for the English language edition"--

The Polyphony of Food explores food as a multiple discourse in the context of Abraham Maslow's theory of the hierarchy of human needs and motivations. In Maslow's theory, food as a basic psychological need belongs to the tier of D (deficit) needs. However.

Understanding how food fads and diets can develop a fervent following that rise to the level of a cult is a new area of study and often overlooked. Here, Kima Cargill and other experts shed fresh light on the subject, revealing how and why such cults may develop among certain communities.