Full Description
Historically, few topics have attracted as much scholarly, professional, or popular attention as food and eating--as one might expect, considering the fundamental role of food in basic human survival. Almost daily, a new food documentary, cooking show, diet program, food guru, or eating movement arises to challenge yesterday's dietary truths and the ways we think about dining.
This work brings together voices from a wide range of disciplines, providing a fascinating feast of scholarly perspectives on food and eating practices, contemporary and historic, local and global. Nineteen essays cover a vast array of food-related topics, including the ever-increasing problems of agricultural globalization, the contemporary mass-marketing of a formerly grassroots movement for organic food production, the Food Network's successful mediation of social class, the widely popular phenomenon of professional competitive eating and current trends in "culinary tourism" and fast food advertising.
Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword by John Shelton Lawrence
Introduction
PART I. FROM PRE-MODERNITY TO THE HYPERMODERN AGE
1. Man, Machine and Refined Dining in Victorian America
Hillary Murtha
2. Shopping for What Never Was: The Rhetoric of Food, Social Style and Nostalgia
Carlnita Greene
3. All You Can Eat: Sociological Reflections on Food in the Hypermodern Era
Simon Gottschalk
PART II. EAT LOCALLY, THINK GLOBALLY
4. Raising the Bar: The Complicated Consumption of Chocolate
Ellen E. Moore
5. The Espresso Revolution: Introducing Coffee-Bar Franchising to Modern China
Jackie Cook and Robert Lee
6. Mass Agrarianism: Wal-Mart and Organic Foods
Dawn Gilpin
PART III. ENTERTAINING FOOD AND EATING
7. "Everybody Eats": The Food Network and Symbolic Capital
Megan Mullen
8. Semiotic Sound Bites: Toward an Alimentary Analysis of Popular Song
Christopher Joseph Westgate
9. Hunger and Satiety in Latin American Literature
Santiago Daydi-Tolson
PART IV. WE ARE WHERE WE EAT
10. Reengineering "Authenticity": Tourism Encounters with Cuisine in Rural Great Britain
Craig Wight
11. Passing Time: The Ironies of Food in Prison Culture
Jim Thomas
12. Selfish Consumers: Delmonico's Restaurant and Learning to Satisfy Personal Desire
Heather Lee
13. Is it Really Better to Travel Than to Arrive? Airline Food as a Reflection of Consumer Anxiety
Guillaume de Syon
PART V. COME JOIN US
14. Deconstructing the Myth of the Dysfunctional Black Family in the Film Soul Food
Tina M. Harris
15. Cultural Representation of Taste in Ang Lee's Eat, Drink, Man, Woman
Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley
PART VI. EAT, DRINK AND BE PUBLIC
16. Snacking as Ritual: Eating Behavior in Public Places Phillip Vannini
17. Beyond Bread and Circuses: Professional Competitive Eating
Lawrence C. Rubin
PART VII. SELF-REFLECTION IN A FUN-HOUSE MIRROR
18. "Gourmandizing," Gluttony and Oral Fixations: Perspectives on Overeating in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 1844 to the Present
Dr. Mallay Occhiogrosso
19. Having It His Way: The Construction of Masculinity in Fast-Food TV Advertising
Carrie Packwood Freeman and Debra Merskin
Afterword by Lawrence C. Rubin
About the Contributors
Index
