Food Words: Essays in Culinary Culture

Description

Food Words is a series of provocative essays on some of the most important keywords in the emergent field of food studies, focusing on current controversies and on-going debates. Words like 'choice' and 'convenience' are often used as explanatory terms in understanding consumer behavior but are clearly ideological in the way they reflect particular positions and serve specific interests, while words like 'taste' and 'value' are no less complex and contested. Inspired by Raymond Williams, Food Words traces the multiple meanings of each of our keywords, tracking nuances in different (academic, commercial and policy) contexts. Mapping the dynamic meanings of each term, the book moves forward from critical assessment to active intervention -- an attitude that is reflected in the lively, sometimes combative, style of the essays. Each essay is research-based and fully referenced but accessible to the general reader. With a foreword by eminent food scholar Warren Belasco, Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland-Baltmore County, and written by an inter-disciplinary team associated with the CONANX research project (Consumer culture in an 'age of anxiety'), Food Words will be essential reading for food scholars across the arts, humanities and social sciences.

Peter Jackson is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Sheffield where he leads the CONANX research group which focuses on consumer culture in an 'age of anxiety' with a particular interest in consumer anxieties about food.

This volume is a welcome contribution to the growing public conversation about food in our world today. By locating key terms in these discussions within shifting and contested landscapes of meaning, it reveals the complexities and contradictions glossed by simpler assertions, and provides a much-needed foundation for a more robust, critical understanding of the forces shaping contemporary food and foodways. * Harry G. West, Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the SOAS Food Studies Centre, University of London, UK * This book is an inspirational and generative intervention in the food literature that will prompt deep and reflective discussion amongst and beyond food researchers and scholars. Food Words offers 60 essays on a diversity of topics chosen to give interdisciplinary insights into food at work in the world. The intellectual journey into culinary culture in each essay, and the book as a whole, transforms our understandings of the contours of the fast moving field of food. * Richard Le Heron, University of Auckland, New Zealand * Here is a remarkable way to organize information: part dictionary, part reading list and part pure essay in the spirit of Montaigne. The topics are both critical and expository and the broad range will help guide even the most seasoned food scholar in a way that reference works rarely do. Most importantly, this book will work wonderfully in the classroom. * Ken Albala, University of the Pacific, USA * Timely, highly readable and engaging, Food Words throws down an intellectual gauntlet for food studies scholars to pick up and chew over. This volume is a must read for all manner of 'foodies' and will no doubt become a touchstone in the excitingly re-vitalised study of food culture for many years to come. * Mike Goodman, Senior Lecturer, Department of Geography, King's College London, UK * The essays are, to use a culinary term, bite-sized and thus easily digestible... You are getting a lot more than a typical dictionary or encyclopaedia description, it is more a collection of thoughts that direct you, upon request, to other topics, to other reference sources and to other trains of thought. * Yum.fi * Food Words will, I believe, prove to be invaluable to food studies students as a concise guide to the principal ideas and issues currently occupying the minds of the leaders in their chosen subject . . . [It] will, I suggest, also provide fascinating insights into the new world of food studies and, indeed, the wider world of sociological thinking on food and food security issues . . . For me it was a fascinating and most enjoyable read-a book that I kept dipping into with pleasure, in the sure knowledge that whatever entry I started reading would, by turns, stimulate and provoke me, and would most certainly set my mind spinning off at an unexpected tangent of further creative thought . . . 'Food studies' is clearly a rapidly evolving field ... so I look forward to the second edition of this informative and entertaining book with keen anticipation. -- D. S. Ingram * Food Security * The essay nature of the entries is important ... each entry still conveys a distinctive and personalized authorial perspective ... there is much to enjoy about this book, for the quality of writing is generally very high ... it could become an important reference text for undergraduate and post graduate students. -- Colin Sage * Social & Cultural Geography *