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 century. 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 from some new and established voices and that have been pushing the limits of the field into ever more fascinating and innovative directions. Taking Food Public is organized into five interrelated sections: food production, consumption, performance, diasporas, and activism. The articles in this reader aim to provide new perspectives on the changing meanings and uses of food in the twenty-first century.This book integrates understandings of race, class, gender, region, sexuality and ethnic/national identity into the human experience of food. Taking Food Public also examines how this experience is manifested in extraordinary formsof food production and consumption (in mass media performances of cooking and eating, redefinitions of foodways throughout Diasporas, identities around food, and in food activism).Most important, this bewildering array of new academic insights into food and culture as well as the wealth of new food trends and food issues around the world cries out for original ways to frame, organize, and help teach these new developments. Here are the right Editors to help write original, teachable, foundational essays and otherwise organize this disparate, exciting new material into a coherent whole"--

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.