Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture

Description

Food is not only something we eat, it is something we use to define ourselves. Ingestion and incorporation are central to our connection with the world outside our bodies. Food's powerful social, economic, political and symbolic roles cannot be ignored - what we eat is a marker of power, cultural capital, class, ethnic and racial identity. Bite Me considers the ways in which popular culture reveals our relationship with food and our own bodies and how these have become an arena for political and ideological battles. Drawing on an extraordinary range of material - films, books, comics, songs, music videos, websites, slang, performances, advertising and mass-produced objects - Bite Me invites the reader to take a fresh look at today's products and practices to see how much food shapes our lives, perceptions and identities.

Fabio Parasecoli is President of the Association for the Study of Food and Society and teaches on food history, culture and the arts at the Citta del Gusto School in Rome and at New York University. He is also a journalist for the food and wine magazine Gambero Rosso and author of Food Culture in Italy.

In Bite Me, Fabio Parasecoli gives us a riveting tour of the role of food in popular culture. Parasecoli takes a fresh and wonderfully analytical look at the deeper societal meanings of such matters as vampires, South Park, and the Atkins diet - subjects not often perceived as grist for scholarly mills. Never has semiotics been so much fun. Marion Nestle, New York University