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Food in the USA: A Reader

The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning and Power

Food and Culture: A Reader

Food and Gender: Identity and Power

Slow - the international herald of taste and culture

Around the Tuscan Table

Food and Culture: A Reader
edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik
New York: Routledge, 1997.

Food touches everything important to people: it marks social differences and strengthens social bonds. But food can signify very different things from table to table.

Food and Culture takes a global look at the social, symbolic, and political-economic roles of what - and how - we eat. The selections examine some of the meanings of food and eating across cultures, with particular attention to how men and women define themselves differently through their foodways. Articles reveal how food habits and beliefs both present a microcosm of any culture and also contribute to our understanding of human behavior. Crossing many disciplinary boundaries, Food and Culture includes the perspectives of anthropology, history, psychology, philosophy, and sociology.

Table of Contents

Foreword from The Gastronomical Me by M.F.K. Fisher

Introduction by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik

Food, Meaning and Voice


1. The Changing Significance of Food by Margaret Mead


2. Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumptionby Roland Barthes


3. The Culinary Triangle by Claude LÈvi-Strauss


4. Deciphering a Meal by Mary Douglas


5. The Semiotics of Food in the Bible by Jean Soler


6. The Abominable Pig by Marvin Harris


7. Traditional Medical Values of Food by E.N. Anderson



Commensality and Fasting: Giving, Receiving, and Refusing Food


8. Food as a Cultural Construction by Anna Meigs


9. The Psychoanalytic Study of Infantile Feeding Disturbances by Anna Freud


10. Nutritional Processes and Personality Development among the Gurage of Ethiopia by Dorothy Shack


11. Hunger, Anxiety and Ritual: Deprivation and Spirit Possession among the Gurage of Ethiopia by William Shack


12. Fast, Feast, and Flesh: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women by Caroline Walker Bynum


13. Appetite as Voice by Joan Jacobs Brumberg


14. Conflict and Deference by Marjorie DeVault



Food, Body and Culture


15. An Anthropological Approach to the Problem of Obesity by Hortense Powdermaker


16. Body Image and Self-Awareness by Hilde Bruch


17. Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of Culture by Susan Bordo


18. Que Gordita by Emily Bradley Massara


19. The Sweetness of Fat: Health, Procreation and Sociability in Rural Jamaica by Elisa J. Sobo


20. Soul, Black Women and Food by Marvalene H. Hughes



The Political Economy of Food: Commodification and Scarcity


21. Bread as World: Food Habits and Social Relations in Modernizing Sardinia by Carole Counihan


22. Japanese Mothers and Obentos: The Lunch Box as Ideological State Apparatus by Anne Allison


23. On the Civilising of Appetite by Stephen Mennell


24. Industrial Food: Towards the Development of a World Cuisine by Jack Goody


25. Time, Sugar, and Sweetness by Sidney Mintz


26. The Politics of Breastfeeding by Penny Van Esterik


27. Hunger, Malnutrition and Poverty in the Contemporary United States: Some Observations on their Social and Cultural Context by Janet Fitchen


28. Beyond the Myths of Hunger: What We Can Do by Frances Moore LappÈ and Joseph Collins