Few contemporary societies remain beyond the global reach of today’s fast food industry. In both profound and subtle ways, this style of cuisine and the corporate brands that promote it have effectively transformed the appetites, health profiles, and consumer sensibilities of millions the world over. To better understand the variegated impact of McDonald’s and other national and international quick-service eateries on local life within a non-western urban context, Ty Matejowsky offers readers a highly engaging and granular account detailing the rise and popularity of these American-style chains throughout the Philippines. In Fast Food Globalization in the Provincial Philippines, Matejowsky examines the rich, diverse, and decidedly syncretic food traditions of the Philippines, one of the few global markets where industry giant McDonald’s lags behind in competition with an indigenous chain. Drawing on over twenty years of ethnographic fieldwork in two provincial Philippine cities—Dagupan City, Pangasinan and San Fernando City, La Union—Matejowsky has crafted one of the few anthropological accounts of fast food production and consumption within the socioeconomic milieu of a less-developed country. By turns critically engaged and highly reflexive, he examines many of the historical, political, economic, and sociocultural complexities that characterize the Philippines’ now thriving fast food scene. Amid intersections of post-colonial resistance, retail indigenization, corporatized childhood experiences, and rising “globesity,” Matejowsky considers the myriad ways this seemingly ubiquitous dining format is reimagined by industry players and everyday Filipinos to create something that is both intimately familiar and entirely new.

This book explores the intersection of food and foodways from global and local perspectives. The collection contributes to interdisciplinary debates about the role and movement of commodities in the historical and contemporary world. The expert contributions collectively address a fundamental tension in the emerging scholarly terrain of food studies, namely theorizing the relationship between foodstuff production and cuisine patterns. They explore a wide variety of topics, including curry, bread, sugar, coffee, milk, pulque, Virginia ham, fast-food, obesity, and US ethnic restaurants. Local Foods Meet Global Foodways considers movements in context, and, in doing so, complicates the notions that food 'shapes' culture as it crosses borders or that culture 'adapts' foods to its neo-local or global contexts. By analysing the dynamics of contact between mobile foods and/or people and the specific cultures of consumption they provoke, these case studies reveal the process whereby local foods become global or global foods become local, to be a dynamic, co-creative development jointly facilitated by humans and nature. This volume explores a vast expanse of global regions, such as North and Central America, Europe, China, East Asia and the Pacific, India, sub-Saharan Africa, the Atlantic Ocean, and the USSR/Russia. It includes a foreword by the eminent food scholar Carole Counihan, and an afterword by noted theorist of cuisine Rachel Laudan, and will be of great interest to students and researchers of history, anthropology, geography, cultural studies and American studies. This book is based on a special issue of Food and Foodways.

Wilk and his colleagues draw upon their own international field experience to examine how food systems are changing around the globe. The authors offer a cultural perspective that is missing in other economic and developmental studies, and provide rich ethnographic data on markets, industrial production, and food economies. This new book will appeal to professionals in economic and environmental anthropology: economic development, agricultural economics, consumer behavior, nutritional sciences, environmental sustainability, and globalization studies.

The influence of food has grown rapidly as it has become more and more intertwined with popular culture in recent decades. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Food and Popular Culture offers an authoritative, comprehensive overview of and introduction to this growing field of research. Bringing together over 20 original essays from leading experts, including Amy Bentley, Deborah Lupton, Fabio Parasecoli, and Isabelle de Solier, its impressive breadth and depth serves to define the field of food and popular culture. Divided into four parts, the book covers: - Media and Communication; including film, television, print media, the Internet, and emerging media - Material Cultures of Eating; including eating across the lifespan, home cooking, food retail, restaurants, and street food - Aesthetics of Food; including urban landscapes, museums, visual and performance arts - Socio-Political Considerations; including popular discourses around food science, waste, nutrition, ethical eating, and food advocacy Each chapter outlines key theories and existing areas of research whilst providing historical context and considering possible future developments. The Editors' Introduction by Kathleen LeBesco and Peter Naccarato, ensures cohesion and accessibility throughout. A truly interdisciplinary, ground-breaking resource, this book makes an invaluable contribution to the study of food and popular culture. It will be an essential reference work for students, researchers and scholars in food studies, film and media studies, communication studies, sociology, cultural studies, and American studies.

Obesity is a global public health problem of crucial importance. Obesity rates remain high in high-income countries and are rapidly increasing in low- and middle- income countries. Concurrently, the global consumption of unhealthy products, such as soft drinks and processed foods, continues to rise. The ongoing expansion of multinational food and beverage companies, or ‘Big Food’, is a key factor behind these trends. This collection provides critical insight into the global expansion of ‘Big Food’, including its incursion into low-and-middle income countries. It examines the changing dynamics of the global food supply, and discusses how low-income countries can alter the ‘Big Food’-diet from the bottom-up. It examines a number of issues related to ‘Big Food’ marketing strategies, including the way in which they advertise to youths and the rural poor. These issues are discussed in terms of their public health implications, and their relation to public health activities, for example ‘soda taxes’, and the promotion of nutritionally-healthier products. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Public Health.

The story of low-wage workers rising up around the world to demand respect and a living wage. Tracing a new labor movement sparked and sustained by low-wage workers from across the globe, “We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now” is an urgent, illuminating look at globalization as seen through the eyes of workers-activists: small farmers, fast-food servers, retail workers, hotel housekeepers, home-healthcare aides, airport workers, and adjunct professors who are fighting for respect, safety, and a living wage. With original photographs by Liz Cooke and drawing on interviews with activists in many US cities and countries around the world, including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Mexico, South Africa, and the Philippines, it features stories of resistance and rebellion, as well as reflections on hope and change as it rises from the bottom up.

This innovative and global best-seller helped establish food studies courses throughout the social sciences and humanities when it was first published in 1997. The fourth edition of Food and Culture contains favorite articles from earlier editions and several new pieces on food politics, globalism, agriculture, and race and gender identity.