Overview

In recent years, the ways in which food is produced, distributed, and consumed have emerged as prominent health and social issues. With rising concern about rates of obesity, food systems have attracted the attention of state actors, leading to both innovative and controversial public health interventions, such as citywide soda bans, ""veggie prescription"" initiatives, and farm-to-school programs. At the same time, social movement activism has emerged focused on issues related to food and health, including movements for food justice, food safety, farm worker's rights, and community control of land for agricultural production. Meanwhile, many individuals and families struggle to obtain food that is affordable, accessible, and meaningfully connected to their cultures. Volume 18 of Advances in Medical Sociology brings cutting-edge sociological research to bear on these multiple dimensions of food systems and their impacts on individual and population health. This volume will highlight how food systems matter for health policy, health politics, and the lived experiences and life chances of individuals and communities.

Full Product Details

9781786350923

Table of Contents

Reviews

Sociologists address critiques of the dominant food system, causes of poor nutrition and its public health consequences, food policy and program initiatives at multiple levels, and divergent cultural and political responses to policy interventions. Their topics include rich foods: the cross-national effects of healthy eating on health outcomes, food priorities: socio-demographic variation in constrained choices at the grocery store, educational attainment and dietary lifestyles, extensions of what and to whom: a qualitative study of self-provisioning service delivery in a university extension program, and grounded in the neighborhood and the community: social capital and health in community gardens. -- Annotation ©2017 * (protoview.com) *

Sociologists address critiques of the dominant food system, causes of poor nutrition and its public health consequences, food policy and program initiatives at multiple levels, and divergent cultural and political responses to policy interventions. Their topics include rich foods: the cross-national effects of healthy eating on health outcomes, food priorities: socio-demographic variation in constrained choices at the grocery store, educational attainment and dietary lifestyles, extensions of what and to whom: a qualitative study of self-provisioning service delivery in a university extension program, and grounded in the neighborhood and the community: social capital and health in community gardens. -- Annotation (c)2017 * (protoview.com) *

Author Information

Sara Shostak is Associate Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Health: Science, Society, and Policy (HSSP) Program at Brandeis University. Her research and teaching interests encompass medical sociology, science and technology studies, and environmental sociology. Across these domains, Shostak focuses on how to understand - and address - inequalities in health. Shostak's first book - Exposed Science: Genes, the Environment, and the Politics of Population Health (University of California Press, 2013) - won the Robert K. Merton Book Award from the American Sociology Association’s Section on Science, Knowledge and Technology and the Eliot Freidson Outstanding Publication Award from the Medical Sociology Section. Shostak’s current book project is a study of urban agriculture in New England cities; as part of this work, she has collaborated on community based research projects with The Urban Farming Institute of Boston, The Food Project, and Groundwork Somerville.  Brea L. Perry is an Associate Professor of Sociology and an affiliated faculty of the Indiana University Network Science Institute at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research focuses on the intersections of social networks, medical sociology, biosociology, and social inequalities. Her current NIH-funded projects investigate social network indicators of prescription drug seeking behavior, the role of personal social networks in neurodegeneration and older adults’ cognitive decline, and the coevolution of recent Mexican immigrants’ social networks and oral health attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes.

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