While the phenomenon of embodied knowledge is becoming integrated into the social sciences, critical geography, and feminist research agendas it continues to be largely ignored by agro-food scholars. This book helps fill this void by inserting into the food literature living, feeling, sensing bodies and will be of interest to food scholars as well as those more generally interested in the phenomenon known as embodied realism. This book is about the materializations of food politics; "materializations", in this case, referring to our embodied, sensuous, and physical connectivities to food production and consumption. It is through these materializations, argues Carolan, that we know food (and the food system more generally), others and ourselves.

While the phenomenon of embodied knowledge is becoming integrated into the social sciences, critical geography, and feminist research agendas it continues to be largely ignored by agro-food scholars. This book helps fill this void by inserting into the food literature living, feeling, sensing bodies and will be of interest to food scholars as well as those more generally interested in the phenomenon known as embodied realism. This book is about the materializations of food politics; "materializations", in this case, referring to our embodied, sensuous, and physical connectivities to food production and consumption. It is through these materializations, argues Carolan, that we know food (and the food system more generally), others and ourselves.

This important collection presents a radical reconception of the place of knowledge in contemporary policymaking in Europe, based not on assumptions about evidence, expertise or experience but on the different forms that knowledge takes. Knowledge is embodied in people, inscribed in documents and instruments, and enacted in specific circumstances. Empirical case studies of health and education policy in different national and international contexts demonstrate the essential interdependence of different forms and phases of knowledge. They illustrate the ways in which knowledge is mobilised and resisted, and draw attention to key problems in the processing and transformation of knowledge in policy work. This novel theoretical framework offers real benefits for policymakers, academics in public policy, public administration, management studies, sociology, education, public health and social work, and those with a practical interest in education and health and related fields of public policy.

Current discussions of the ethics around alternative food movements--concepts such as "local," "organic," and "fair trade"--tend to focus on their growth and significance in advanced capitalist societies. In this groundbreaking contribution to critical food studies, editors Yuson Jung, Jakob A. Klein, and Melissa L. Caldwell explore what constitutes "ethical food" and "ethical eating" in socialist and formerly socialist societies. With essays by anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers, this politically nuanced volume offers insight into the origins of alternative food movements and their place in today's global economy. Collectively, the essays cover discourses on food and morality; the material and social practices surrounding production, trade, and consumption; and the political and economic power of social movements in Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Lithuania, Russia, and Vietnam. Scholars and students will gain important historical and anthropological perspective on how the dynamics of state-market-citizen relations continue to shape the ethical and moral frameworks guiding food practices around the world.

This book explores food from a philosophical perspective, bringing together leading philosophers to consider the most basic questions about food. Each essay analyses many contemporary debates in food studies. Slow Food, sustainability, food safety, and politics, and addresses such issues as happy meat, aquaculture, veganism, and table manners.

"In 1968 Magnus Pyke argued that what "human communities choose to eat is only partly dependent on their physiological requirements, and even less on intellectual reasoning and a knowledge of what these physiological requirements are." Pyke, a nutritional scientist who had worked under the Chief Scientific Advisor to Britain's Ministry of Food during the Second World War, illustrated his point by recounting that in preparing the nation for war, military officials had demanded that land be allocated to grow gherkins. They had insisted, Pyke recalled, that the British soldier "could not fight without a proper supply of pickles to eat with his cold meat." The Ministry of War had apparently been "unmoved to learn from the nutritional experts" that pickles offered little of material value to the diet, as they had almost no calories, vitamins, or minerals. The Ministry of Food, Pyke asserted, nevertheless designated precious agricultural land for gherkin cultivation. For what the human body requires, this former government official conceded, often needs to be subordinate to what "the human being to whom the body belongs" desires.1 This pickle episode exemplifies why a book about government feeding must be more than merely a study of the impact of food science on state policy. The nutritional sciences, which began to emerge in the late eighteenth century and made significant advances from the 1840s,2 established that the nutritive and energy potential of food could be measured, calibrated, and deployed. Food science might have been one of the "engine sciences" that Patrick Carroll positions as central to modern state formation, particularly in the British Isles.3 But if science was integral to modern forms of governance, it must nevertheless be understood not as preceding and dictating state action but rather, as Christopher Hamlin has argued, as "a resource parties appeal to (or make up as they go along) for use wherever authority is needed: to authorize themselves to act, to compete for the public's interest and money, to neutralize real or potential critics."4 That there was "a sharp division" between "theoretical knowledge" of nutrition and "its practical implementation"5 was thus often strategic"--

We all witness, in advertising and on supermarket shelves, the fierce competition for our food dollars. In this title, the author reveals how the competition really works and how it affects our health. It illustrates food politics in action: watered-down government dietary advice, diet supplements promoted as if they were First Amendment rights.