Liquid Bread

Anthropologists, food and beverage scientists, psychologists, health professionals, and other scholars explore connections between bread and beer as closely related staples from the earliest records in what is now Iran to the present. Their topics include why animals naturally ingest ethanol, the basics of brewing, beer in prehistoric Europe, anthropological and social psychological aspects of alcohol consumption and binge drinking in German and American fraternities, the ritual use of beer in South-West Tanzania, rice beer and social cohesion in the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak, and global versus local in beer and European media. The 20 papers are from a conference held somewhere in Bavaria on an unidentified date. Annotation c2011 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Wulf Schiefenhovel is Head of the Human Ethology Group, Max-Planck-Institute, Andechs, Germany; Professor for Medical Psychology and Ethnomedicine at the University of Munich; President of the International Society for Human Ethology; and European deputy chair of the International Commission on the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (ICAF). He has carried out field studies in Melanesia since 1965.

Helen Macbeth is President of the International Commission on the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (ICAF) and is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Anthropology Department, Oxford Brookes University. Among other books she has edited or co-edited are three other volumes in this series, Food Preferences and Taste: Continuity and Change, Researching Food Habits: Methods and Problems and Consuming the Inedible: Neglected Dimensions of Food Choice.