Few things are as important as the food we eat. Conversations in Food Studies demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary research through the cross-pollination of disciplinary, epistemological, and methodological perspectives. Widely diverse essays, ranging from the meaning of milk, to the bring-your-own-wine movement, to urban household waste, are the product of collaborating teams of interdisciplinary authors. Readers are invited to engage and reflect on the theories and practices underlying some of the most important issues facing the emerging field of food studies today. Conversations in Food Studies brings to the table thirteen original contributions organized around the themes of representation, governance, disciplinary boundaries, and, finally, learning through food. This collection offers an important and groundbreaking approach to food studies as it examines and reworks the boundaries that have traditionally structured the academy and that underlie much of food studies literature.

"Conversations With Food" offers readers an array of essays revealing the power of food (and its absence) to transform relationships between the human and non-human realms; to define national, colonial, and postcolonial cultures; to help instantiate race, gender, and class relations; and to serve as the basis for policymaking. Food functions in these contexts as items in religious or secular law, as objects with which to bargain or over which to fight, as literary trope, and as a way to improve or harm health—individual or collective. The anthology ranges from Ancient Greece to the posthuman fairy underworld; from the codifying of French culinary heritage to the strategic marketing of 100-calorie snacks; from the European famine after the Second World War to the lush and exotic cuisines of culinary tourism today. "Conversations With Food" will engage anyone interested in discovering the disciplinary breadth and depth of food studies. The anthology is ideally suited for introductory and advanced courses in food studies, as it includes essays in a range of humanities and social science disciplines, and each author draws cross-disciplinary linkages between their own work and other essays in the volume. This thematic and conceptual intercalation, when read with the editors’ introduction, makes the collection an exceptionally strong representation of the field of food studies.

Over the past decade there has been a remarkable flowering of interest in food and nutrition, both within the popular media and in academia. Scholars are increasingly using foodways, food systems and eating habits as a new unit of analysis within their own disciplines, and students are rushing into classes and formal degree programs focused on food. Introduced by the editor and including original articles by over thirty leading food scholars from around the world, the Routledge International Handbook of Food Studies offers students, scholars and all those interested in food-related research a one-stop, easy-to-use reference guide. Each article includes a brief history of food research within a discipline or on a particular topic, a discussion of research methodologies and ideological or theoretical positions, resources for research, including archives, grants and fellowship opportunities, as well as suggestions for further study. Each entry also explains the logistics of succeeding as a student and professional in food studies. This clear, direct Handbook will appeal to those hoping to start a career in academic food studies as well as those hoping to shift their research to a food-related project. Strongly interdisciplinary, this work will be of interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities.

Sheds light on the history of food, cooking, and eating. This collection of essays investigates the connections between food studies and women's studies. From women in colonial India to Armenian American feminists, these essays show how food has served as a means to assert independence and personal identity.

An introduction to the burgeoning field of food studies Popular and intellectual interest in food is on the rise. The breadth of concerns surrounding food ranges from animal welfare and climate change’s impact on food production to debates on the healthfulness of carbohydrates and fats, and fair compensation for restaurant and farm workers. Not only is there an expanding conversation about the ways in which we produce and consume our food, but there is growing attention being placed on the myriad ways in which food expresses and shapes shifting identities. Practicing Food Studies details the turn of the twenty-first century development and flourishing of food studies as a multidisciplinary field, focusing on its establishment at New York University. Food studies scholars have come from various fields such as history, sociology, economics, political science, nutrition, or public policy, but often felt limited by the conventions of their traditional discipline. Many gravitated to food studies to be able to describe and critically examine their specific areas of interest beyond the borders of academic disciplines. This volume explores the history of knowledge in which NYU Food Studies emerged, providing the opportunity to reflect on how academic fields are created and evolve as a response to institutional constraints and opportunities, the landscape of ideas, social movements, and public conversations. Practicing Food Studies is a compelling collection of essays compiling the research, ideas, and experiences of faculty members and graduates of the NYU Food Studies program—mapping the paths for intellectual and social engagement with food systems and its most urgent issues.

What is meat? Is it simply food to consume, or a metaphor for our own bodies? Can “bloody” vegan burgers, petri dish beef, live animals, or human milk be categorized as meat? In pursuing these questions, the contributors to Meat! trace the shifting boundaries of the meanings of meat across time, geography, and cultures. In studies of chicken, fish, milk, barbecue, fake meat, animal sacrifice, cannibalism, exotic meat, frozen meat, and other manifestations of meat, they highlight meat's entanglements with race, gender, sexuality, and disability. From the imperial politics embedded in labeling canned white tuna as “the chicken of the sea” to the relationship between beef bans, yoga, and bodily purity in Hindu nationalist politics, the contributors demonstrate how meat is an ideal vantage point from which to better understand transnational circuits of power and ideology as well as the histories of colonialism, ableism, and sexism. Contributors. Neel Ahuja, Irina Aristarkhova, Sushmita Chatterjee, Mel Y. Chen, Kim Q. Hall, Jennifer A. Hamilton, Anita Mannur, Elspeth Probyn, Parama Roy, Banu Subramaniam, Angela Willey, Psyche Williams-Forson

Literature and Food Studies introduces readers to a growing interdisciplinary field by examining literary genres and cultural movements as they engage with the edible world and, in turn, illuminate transnational histories of empire, domesticity, scientific innovation, and environmental transformation and degradation. With a focus on the Americas and Europe, Literature and Food Studies compares works of imaginative literature, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale to James Joyce’s Ulysses and Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, with what the authors define as vernacular literary practices—which take written form as horticultural manuals, recipes, cookbooks, restaurant reviews, agricultural manifestos, dietary treatises, and culinary guides. For those new to its principal subject, Literature and Food Studies introduces core concepts in food studies that span anthropology, geography, history, literature, and other fields; it compares canonical literary texts with popular forms of print culture; and it aims to inspire future research and teaching. Combining a cultural studies approach to foodways and food systems with textual analysis and archival research, the book offers an engaging and lucid introduction for humanities scholars and students to the rapidly expanding field of food studies.

This wide-ranging volume explores the tension between the dietary practice of veganism and the manifestation, construction, and representation of a vegan identity in today’s society. Emerging in the early 21st century, vegan studies is distinct from more familiar conceptions of "animal studies," an umbrella term for a three-pronged field that gained prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s, consisting of critical animal studies, human animal studies, and posthumanism. While veganism is a consideration of these modes of inquiry, it is a decidedly different entity, an ethical delineator that for many scholars marks a complicated boundary between theoretical pursuit and lived experience. The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies is the must-have reference for the important topics, problems, and key debates in the subject area and is the first of its kind. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors, this handbook is divided into five parts: History of vegan studies Vegan studies in the disciplines Theoretical intersections Contemporary media entanglements Veganism around the world These sections contextualize veganism beyond its status as a dietary choice, situating veganism within broader social, ethical, legal, theoretical, and artistic discourses. This book will be essential reading for students and researchers of vegan studies, animal studies, and environmental ethics.

The vocabulary of wine is large and exceptionally vibrant -- from straight-forward descriptive words like "sweet" and "fragrant", colorful metaphors like "ostentatious" and "brash", to the more technical lexicon of biochemistry. The world of wine vocabulary is growing alongside the current popularity of wine itself, particularly as new words are employed by professional wine writers, who not only want to write interesting prose, but avoid repetition and cliché. The question is, what do these words mean? Can they actually reflect the objective characteristics of wine, and can two drinkers really use and understand these words in the same way? In this second edition of Wine and Conversation, linguist Adrienne Lehrer explores whether or not wine drinkers (both novices and experts) can in fact understand wine words in the same way. Her conclusion, based on experimental results, is no. Even though experts do somewhat better than novices in some experiments, they tend to do well only on wines on which they are carefully trained and/or with which they are very familiar. Does this mean that the elaborate language we use to describe wine is essentially a charade? Lehrer shows that although scientific wine writing requires a precise and shared use of language, drinking wine and talking about it in casual, informal setting with friends is different, and the conversational goals include social bonding as well as communicating information about the wine. Lehrer also shows how language innovation and language play, clearly seen in the names of new wines and wineries, as well as wine descriptors, is yet another influence on the burgeoning and sometimes whimsical world of wine vocabulary.

Food matters, not only as a subject of study in its own right, but also as a medium for conveying critical messages about capitalism, the environment, and social inequality to diverse audiences. Recent scholarship on the subject draws from both a pathbreaking body of secondary literature and an inexhaustible wealth of primary sources--from ancient Chinese philosophical tracts to McDonald's menus--contributing new perspectives to the historical study of food, culture, and society, and challenging the limits of history itself. The Oxford Handbook of Food History places existing works in historiographical context, crossing disciplinary, chronological, and geographic boundaries while also suggesting new routes for future research. The twenty-seven essays in this book are organized into five sections: historiography, disciplinary approaches, production, circulation, and consumption of food. The first two sections examine the foundations of food history, not only in relation to key developments in the discipline of history itself--such as the French Annales school and the cultural turn--but also in anthropology, sociology, geography, pedagogy, and the emerging Critical Nutrition Studies. The following three sections sketch various trajectories of food as it travels from farm to table, factory to eatery, nature to society. Each section balances material, cultural, and intellectual concerns, whether juxtaposing questions of agriculture and the environment with the notion of cookbooks as historical documents; early human migrations with modern culinary tourism; or religious customs with social activism. In its vast, interdisciplinary scope, this handbook brings students and scholars an authoritative guide to a field with fresh insights into one of the most fundamental human concerns.