Overview

Why We Eat, How We Eat maps new terrains in thinking about relations between bodies and foods. With the central premise that food is both symbolic and material, the volume explores the intersections of current critical debates regarding how individuals eat and why they eat. Through a wide-ranging series of case studies it examines how foods and bodies both haphazardly encounter, and actively engage with, one another in ways that are simultaneously material, social, and political. The aim and uniqueness of this volume is therefore the creation of a multidisciplinary dialogue through which to produce new understandings of these encounters that may be invisible to more established paradigms. In so doing, Why We Eat, How We Eat concomitantly employs eating as a tool - a novel way of looking - while also drawing attention to the term 'eating' itself, and to the multiple ways in which it can be constituted. The volume asks what eating is - what it performs and silences, what it produces and destroys, and what it makes present and absent. It thereby traces the webs of relations and multiple scales in which eating bodies are entangled; in diverse and innovative ways, contributors demonstrate that eating draws into relationships people, places and objects that may never tangibly meet, and show how these relations are made and unmade with every mouthful. By illuminating these contemporary encounters, Why We Eat, How We Eat offers an empirically grounded richness that extends previous approaches to foods and bodies.

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9781409447252

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Reviews

'Eating is a bundle of activities and experiences, and involves both destruction and creation. While an everyday practice for everyone, it is both complicated and complex. This book is a masterful examination of the multidimensional nature of eating in symbolic, economic, political, material and nutritional terms, and it a must-read for anyone interested in food and eating.' Stanley Ulijaszek, University of Oxford, UK'This fascinating book is such a timely and welcome addition to the field of food studies. It sets out to destabilise and challenge what we think we know about food and eating by bringing once separate categories into intimate proximity, to touch each other and produce a sensous map of the contours of eating. Spaces between meaning and materiality, commensality and viscerality, and knowledge and bodily practices are oiled and moved into provocative conceptual hinges , revealing complex and layered relations of eating. This work will undoubtedly shift theoretical and applied debates about food and eating to a new level, and will have significance to those many disciplines that have a vested interest in why we eat, and how we eat.' Megan Warin, University of Adelaide, Australia

Author Information

Emma-Jayne Abbots is Lecturer in Social/Cultural Anthropology and Heritage at the University of Wales Trinity St David and Research Associate at the Food Studies Centre, SOAS, University of London, UK. Anna Lavis is Research Fellow at the School of Health and Population Sciences, University of Birmingham and Research Associate at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK. Emma-Jayne Abbots, Anna Lavis, Kaori O'Connor, Anna Lavis, Kim Baker, Simon Cohn, Lucy Aphramor, Jennifer Brady, Jacqui Gingras, Elizabeth Saleh, Jon Holtzman, Sally Brooks, Duika Burges Watson, Alizon Draper, Michael Goodman, Heidi Kvalvaag, Wendy Wills, Maria Yatova, Jim Ormond, Anne Murcott, Samantha Hurn, Rachael Kendrick, Benjamin Coles, Emily Yates-Doerr, Elspeth Probyn.

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