Employs the foodways paradigm to analyze the ideological dimensions of food imagery and food behavior in fiction and documentary films. Cinema is a mosaic of memorable food scenes. Detectives drink alone. Gangsters talk with their mouths full. Families around the world argue at dinner. Food documentaries challenge popular consumption-centered visions. In Appetites and Anxieties: Food, Film, and the Politics of Representation,authors Cynthia Baron, Diane Carson, and Mark Bernard use a foodways paradigm, drawn from the fields of folklore and cultural anthropology, to illuminate film's cultural and material politics. In looking at how films do and do not represent food procurement, preparation, presentation, consumption, clean-up, and disposal, the authors bring the pleasures, dangers, and implications of consumption to center stage. In nine chapters, Baron, Carson, and Bernard consider food in fiction films and documentaries-from both American and international cinema. The first chapter examines film practice from the foodways perspective, supplying a foundation for the collection of case studies that follow. Chapter 2 takes a political economy approach as it examines the food industry and the film industry's policies that determine representations of food in film. In chapter 3, the authors explore food and food interactions as a means for creating community in Bagdad Café, while in chapter 4 they take a close look at 301/302,in which food is used to mount social critique. Chapter 5 focuses on cannibal films, showing how the foodways paradigm unlocks the implications of films that dramatize one of society's greatest food taboos. In chapter 6, the authors demonstrate ways that insights generated by the foodways lens can enrich genre and auteur studies. Chapter 7 considers documentaries about food and water resources, while chapter 8 examines food documentaries that slip through the cracks of film censorship by going into exhibition without an MPAA rating. Finally, in chapter 9, the authors study films from several national cinemas to explore the intersection of food, gender, and ethnicity. Four appendices provide insights from a food stylist, a selected filmography of fiction films and a filmography of documentaries that feature foodways components, and a list of selected works in food and cultural studies. Scholars of film studies and food studies will enjoy the thought-provoking analysis of Appetites and Anxieties.

Despite government claims that food is safer and more readily available today than ever before, recent survey evidence demonstrates high levels of food-related anxiety among Western consumers. While chronic hunger and malnutrition are relatively rare in the West, food scares relating to individual products, concerns about global food security and other expressions of consumer anxiety about food remain widespread. Anxious Appetites explores the causes of these present-day anxieties. Looking at fears over provenance and regulation in a world of lengthening supply chains and greater concentration of corporate power, Peter Jackson investigates how anxieties about food circulate and how they act as a channel for broader social issues. Drawing on case studies such as the 2013 horsemeat scandal and fears about the contamination of infant formula in China in 2008, he examines how and why these concerns emerge. Comparing survey results with ethnographic observation of consumer practice, he explores the gap between official advice about food safety and people's everyday experience of food, including a critique of ideological notions of 'consumer choice'. A captivating, timely book which presents a new theory of social anxiety.

This book traces the various configurations of food as hunger, desire, and appetite which point to the complex dialectic of consumption and consummation of ideas and forms underpinning the arts. It examines the relationship between nature and science, space and the act of artistic creation, desire and the arts, appetite and hunger. One of the aims of the book is to explore established theoretical and historical conceptions of “nature” in the arts and re-think their relationship to appetite in the globalized world. Examining the many guises and figurations of hunger in literature and the arts, this book gives an overview of the themes that emerge from the idea of the Hunger Artist alongside the fact of food: the latter’s significance as a barometer of social class; its rich source as a metaphor in literature and art; its unequal distribution throughout the world; and the means by which its consumption can lead to gluttony and further exploitation of the “hungry.” One of the great strengths of this book is the trans-disciplinary nature of the contributions achieved by mapping how the arts in their representation of social, psychological, political, and philosophical perspectives draw attention to the problems associated with excessive human cravings.

In examining the treatment of food and drink and eating and drinking, Food and Drink in Anglo-Saxon Britain focuses centrally on Old English poetry but also refers extensively to the prose and to texts in other early Germanic languages and in Latin.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched. Prominent citizens in nineteenth-century England believed themselves to be living in a time of unstoppable progress. Yet running just beneath Victorian triumphalism were strong undercurrents of chaos and uncertainty. Richard Walker plumbs the depths of those currents in order to present an alternative history of nineteenth-century society. Mining literary and philosophical works of the period, Walker explores the crisis of identity that beset nineteenth-century thinkers and how that crisis revealed itself in portrayals of addiction, split personalities, and religious mania. Victorian England will never look the same.

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