Food and Culture ― A Reader

This innovative and global best-seller helped establish food studies courses throughout the social sciences and humanities when it was first published in 1997. The 4th edition of Food and Culture contains a new section on water and drinks, and how they tie into meals, a section on policy and activism, and more on obesity and anorexia.

Carole Counihan is Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Millersville University. She has been studying food, gender, and culture in Italy and the USA for forty years. She is author of A Tortilla Is Like Life: Food and Culture in the San Luis Valley of Colorado (2009), Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence (2004), and The Anthropology of Food and Body (1999). She is co-editor of Taking Food Public (2012), Food Activism (2014), and Making Taste Public: Ethnographies of Food and the Senses (forthcoming) and editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal Food and Foodways.

Penny Van Esterik is Professor Emerita of Anthropology, retired from York University, Toronto, where she taught nutritional anthropology, advocacy anthropology and feminist theory. Her fieldwork was primarily in Southeast Asia (Thailand and Lao PDR). She is a founding member of WABA (World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action) and has developed articles and advocacy materials on breastfeeding and women’s work, breastfeeding and feminism, infant feeding and food security and contemporary challenges to infant feeding such as environmental contaminants and HIV/AIDS. Past books include Beyond the Breast-Bottle Controversy, Materializing Thailand, Taking Refuge: Lao Buddhists in North America, and The Dance of Nurture.

Alice Julier is Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Food Studies at Chatham University. She is also the director of the Center for Regional Agriculture, Food, and Transformation (C.R.A.F.T.). She writes about material life, labor, consumption, and inequality in food systems. Her work includes: "Mapping Men onto the Menu," in Food and Foodways, "Family and Domesticity" in A Cultural History of Food: The Modern Age; "Julia at Smith" in Gastronomica, and "Hiding Race and Class in the Discourse of Commercial Food" in From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies. Her book is entitled Eating Together: Food, Friendship, and Inequality. She is the past president of Association for the Study of Food and Society.