Taking Food Public ─ Redefining Foodways in a Changing World

The field of food studies has been growing rapidly over the last thirty years and has exploded since the turn of the millennium. Scholars from an array of disciplines have trained fresh theoretical and methodological approaches onto new dimensions of the human relationship to food. This anthology capitalizes on this particular cultural moment to bring to the fore recent scholarship that focuses on innovative ways people are recasting food in public spaces to challenge hegemonic practices and meanings. Organized into five interrelated sections on food production – consumption, performance, Diasporas, and activism – articles aim to provide new perspectives on the changing meanings and uses of food in the twenty-first century.

Psyche Wililams-Forson is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland College Park and an affiliate faculty member of the Women's Studies and African American Studies departments and the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity. She authored the award-winning book (American Folklore Society), Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (2006). Her new research explores the role of the value market as a immediate site of food acquisition and a project on class, consumption, and citizenship among African Americans by examining domestic interiors from the late nineteenth-century to the early twentieth-century.
Carole Counihan is Professor of Anthropology at Millersville University and editor-in-chief of Food and Foodways journal. She is author of The Anthropology of Food and Body (1999), Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence (2004), and A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado (2009). She is editor of Food in the USA (2002) and, with Penny Van Esterik, of Food and Culture (1997, 2008). She has been a visiting professor at Boston University, the University of Cagliari, the University of Gastronomic Sciences (Italy), and the University of Malta. Her new research focuses on food activism in Italy.

1. Introduction: Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a

Changing World, Psyche Williams-Forson and Carole


Counihan


Rethinking Production
2. Food Industrialization and Food Power: Implications for Food
Governance, Tim Lang

3. Women and Food Chains: The Gendered Politics of Food,
Patricia Allen and Carolyn Sachs

4. Can We Sustain Sustainable Agriculture? Learning from
Small-scale Producer-suppliers in Canada and the UK

5. Things Became Scarce: Food Availability and Accessibility in
Santiago de Cuba Then and Now, Hanna Garth

6. Capitalism and its Discontents: Back-to-the-Lander and
Freegan Foodways in Rural Organ, Joan Gross

7. Cultural Geographies in Practice: The South Central Farm:
Dilemmas in Practicing the Public, Laura Lawson

8. Charlas Cullinarias: Women Speaking from Their Public
Kitchens, Meredith E. Abarca
Rethinking Food Consumption
9. Inequality in Obesigenic Environments: Fast Food Destiny
in New York City, N.O.A. Kwate, Chun-Yip Yau, Ji-Meng
Loh, and Donya Williams

10. Physical Disabilities and Food Access Among Limited
Resource Households, Caroline B. Webber, Jeffrey Sobal,
and Jamie S. Dollahite

11. Other Women Cooked for My Husband: Negotiating
Gender, Food, and Identities in an African
American/Ghanaian Household, Psyche Williams-Forson

12. Going Beyond the Normative, White, "Post-racial" Vegan
Epistemology, Amie Breeze Harper

13. Purity, Soul Food, and Sunni Islam, C. Rouse and J. Hoskins

14. Gleaning from Gluttony: An Australian Youth Subculture
Confront the Ethics of Waste, Ferne Edward and David
Mercer

15. If They Only Knew: Color Blindness and Universalism in
California Alternative Food Institutions, Julie Guthmann

Performing Food Cultures
16. Feeding Desire: Food, Domesticity and Challenges to
Heteropatriarchy, Anita Mannur

17. Towards Queering Food Studies: Foodways,
Heternormativity, and Hungry Women in Chicana Lesbian
Writing, Julia C. Ehrhardt

18. Metrosexuality Can Stuff It: Beef Consumption as
(Heteromasculine) Fortification, C. Wesley Buerkle

19. "Please Pass the Chicken Tits": Rethinking Men and
Cooking at an Urban Firehouse, Jonathan Deutsch

20. Magic Metabolisms: Competitive Eating and the Formation
of an American Bodily Idea, Adrienne Johnson

21. Vintage Breast Milk: Exploring the Discursive Limits of
Feminine Fluids, Penny Van Esterik

22. Do the Hands that Feed Us Hold Us Back?: Implications of
Assisted Eating, Physical Disabilities and Food Access
Among Limited Resource Households, G. Denise Lance

23. Will Tweet for Food, Alison Caldwell

24. Visualizing 21st Century Foodscapes: Using Photographs
and New Media in Food Studies, Melissa Salazar
Food Diasporas Taking Food Global
25. Justice at a Price: Regulation and Alienation in the Global
Economy, Daniel Reichman

26. From the Bottom Up: The Global Expansion of Chinese
Vegetable Trade for New York City Markets, Valerie
Imbruce
27. SPAM and Fast-food ‘Glocalization’ in the Philippines:
Perspectives from the Provincial Philippines, Ty
Matejowsky

28. The Envios of San Pablo Huixtepec, Oaxaca: Food, home,
and transnationalism, J.I. Grieshop

29. Consuming Interests: Water, Rum, and Coca-Colas from
Ritual Propitiation to Corporate Expropriation in Highland
Chiapas, June Nash

30. Feeding the Jewish Soul in the Delta Diaspora, Marcie
Cohen Ferris

31. The Yoruba Body, Julie Boticello

32. Tequila Shots, Marie Sarita Gaytan

33. The Political Uses of Culture: Maize Production and the GM
Corn Debates, Elizabeth Fitting　
Food Activism
34. Practicing Food Democracy: A Pragmatic Politics of
Transformation, Neva Hassanein

35. Food, Place and Authenticity: Local Food and the Sustainable Tourism Experience, Rebecca Sims

36. Mexicans Taking Food Public: The Power of the Kitchen in the San Luis Valley, Carole Counihan

37. A Feminist Examination of Community Kitchen in Peru and Bolivia, Kathleen Schroeder

38. Visceral Difference: Variations in Feeling (Slow) Food, Allison Hayes-Conroy and Jessica Hayes-Conroy

39. Expanding Access and Alternatives: Building Farmers’ Markets in Low-Income Communities, Lisa Markowitz

40. Vegetarians: Uninvited, Uncomfortable, or Special Guests at the Table of the Alternative Food Economy, Carol Morris and James Kirwan

41. Advocacy and Everyday Health Activism among Persons with Celiac Disease: A comparison of Eager, Reluctant, and Non-Activists, Denise Copelton

42. The Year of Eating Politically, Chad Lavin

43. From Food Crisis to Food Sovereignty: The Challenge of Social Movements, Eric Holt-Giménez