Food as Communication / Communication as Food

From high-tech kitchen gadgets and magazines to the Food Network, the last few decades have seen a huge rise in food-focused consumption, media, and culture. The discourses surrounding food range from media coverage of school lunchrooms and hunger issues, to news stories about urban gardening or buying organic products at the local farmers market. Food is no longer viewed merely as a means of survival.
International and comprehensive in approach, this volume is the first book-length study of food from a communication perspective. Scholars examine and explore this emerging field to provide definitive and foundational examples of how food operates as a system of communication, and how communication theory and practices can be understood by considering food in this way. In doing so, the book serves to inspire future dialogues on the subject due to its vast array of ideas about food and its relationship to our communication practices.

Janet M. Cramer, Ph.D., is a communication scholar specializing in media studies, sociology of media, food communication, history, gender studies, and intersectional studies. Her research publications include an examination of ideologies of womanhood in the 19^th century press, the construction of race and class in various forms of media, the cultural meanings of food, and a history of media focusing on the cultural and intellectual traditions that guided mass media development in the United States, titled Media/History/Society: A Cultural History of U.S. Media (2009).

Carlnita P. Greene, Ph.D., is the Dean of Behavioral, Social Sciences & Global Learning at Bunker Hill Community College. She is the author of Gourmands & Gluttons: The Rhetoric of Food Excess (2015) and editor of Foodscapes: Food, Space, and Place in a Global Society (2019). She has previously published on subjects as diverse as identity and social style and the rhetoric of popular culture.

Lynn M. Walters, Ph.D., Licensed Nutritionist (NM), is the founder of Cooking with Kids, Inc., an award-winning non-profit that educates and empowers children and families to make healthy food choices through hands-on learning with fresh, affordable foods: cookingwithkids.org. Her interests focus on the behavioral effects of experiential learning with food; family, peer, and environmental influences on cooking and food choice; and the connections between gardening and health.