Food and Culture: A Reader

Food touches everything important to people: it marks social difference and strengthens social bonds. Common to all people, it can signify very different things from table to table.

Food and Culture takes a global look at the social, symbolic, and political-economic role of food. The stellar contributors to this reader 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. Crossing many subjects, this innovative, first-of-its-kind in the field includes the perspectives of anthropology, history, psychology, philosophy, politics, and sociology. This is the classic text in the field, updated for the first time in a decade, and hailed as the "bible" in the field. A must use for any course on the anthropology or sociology of food. This book comes with a companion website, which you can visit at www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415977777

Carole Counihan is Professor of Anthropology at Millersville University in Pennsylvania and co-editor-in-chief of Food and Foodways. Her earlier books include Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family, and Gender in Twentieth-Century Florence, Food in the USA, and The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power.

Penny Van Esterik is Professor of Anthropology at York University in Toronto, Canada where she teaches nutritional anthropology, in addition to doing research on food and globalization in Southeast Asia. She is a founding member of WABA (World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action)and writes on infant and young child feeding, including her earlier book, Beyond the Breast-Bottle Controversy.