The classic book that helped to define and legitimize the field of food and culture studies is now available, with major revisions, in a specially affordable e-book version (978-0-203-07975-1).

The third edition includes 40 original essays and reprints of previously published classics under 5 Sections: FOUNDATIONS, HEGEMONY AND DIFFERENCE, CONSUMPTION AND EMBODIMENT, FOOD AND GLOBALIZATION, and CHALLENGING, CONTESTING, AND TRANSFORMING THE FOOD SYSTEM.

17 of the 40 articles included are either, new to this edition, rewritten by their original authors, or edited by Counihan and van Esterik.

A bank of test items applicable to each article in the book is available to instructors interested in selecting this edition for course use. Simply send an e.mail to the publisher at textbooksonline@taylorandfrancis.com

Contents

Foreword from The Gastronomical Me, M.F.K. Fisher

Introduction to the Third Edition

Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik

Foundations

Why Do We Overeat

Margaret Mead

This piece questions attitudes towards food and eating in a world where food is overabundant and we face the ambiguity of overindulgence and guilt.

Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption

Roland Barthes

French structuralists explain how food acts as a system of communication and provides a body of images that mark eating situations.

Short excerpt from Distinction

Pierre Bourdieu

Bourdieu addresses differences between taste of luxury and taste of necessity through his theory of class distinction.

The Culinary Triangle

Claude Lévi-Strauss

This classic structuralist statement, often critiqued, shows how food preparation can be analyzed as a triangular semantic field, much like language.

The Abominations of Leviticus

Mary Douglas

Douglas applies structural analysis to the establishment of religious dietary rules as a means to develop self- distinction, and a sense of belonging based on the construction of holiness.

The Abominable Pig

Marvin Harris

Materialists like Harris reject symbolic and structuralist explanations and explain food prohibitions based on economic and ecological utility.

Industrial Food: Towards the Development of a World Cuisine

Jack Goody

The early industrialization of food processing was made possible by advancements in preservation, mechanization, marketing, and transport of food items. These advancements also separated urban and rural societies from food manufacturing.

Time, Sugar, and Sweetness

Sidney W. Mintz

Colonialism made high-status sugar produced in the Caribbean into a working class staple.

Hegemony and Difference: Race, class and gender

More than Just the 'Big Piece of Chicken': The Power of Race, Class, and Food in American Consciousness

Psyche Williams-Forson

Ethnographic, historical, and literary researc...