Food, from cultivation to consumption, provides the chief link between humankind and the "natural" environment. This book analyzes the apparently opposed imperatives of political economy and sustainability.

First published in 1980. The following papers represent a selection of studies which provide such an insight into human food behavior during development. It is hoped that readers will be encouraged to participate in this new quest for knowledge. The time has surely come to document carefully the food practices of different societies. The authors’ hope there will be similar and parallel attempts to evaluate the health and disease status so that the relationships between diet and disease may be clarified.

This volume is geared toward students and instructors involved in cultural ecology, ecological anthropology, and/or human ecology. While covering basic concepts for beginners, this book also provides a thorough and sophisticated discussion of cultural ecology's history and theory using examples from throughout the world, both historical and contemporary.

Literary and Cultural Production, World-Ecology, and the Global Food System marks a significant intervention into the field of literary food studies. Drawing on new work in world literature, cultural studies, and environmental studies, the essays gathered here explore how literary and cultural texts have represented and responded to the global food system from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Covering topics such as the impact of colonial monocultures and industrial agriculture, enclosure and the loss of the commons, the meatification of diets, the toxification of landscapes, and the consequences of climate breakdown, the volume ranges across the globe, from Thailand to Brazil, Cyprus to the Caribbean. Whether it is anxieties over imported meat in late Victorian Britain, labour struggles on Guatemalan banana plantations, or food dependency in Puerto Rico, the contributors to this volume show how fiction, poetry, drama, film, and music have critically explored and contributed to food cultures worldwide.

Everyone eats, but rarely do we ask why or investigate why we eat what we eat. Why do we love spices, sweets, coffee? How did rice become such a staple food throughout so much of eastern Asia? Everyone Eats examines the social and cultural reasons for our food choices and provides an explanation of the nutritional reasons for why humans eat, resulting in a unique cultural and biological approach to the topic. E. N. Anderson explains the economics of food in the globalization era, food's relationship to religion, medicine, and ethnicity as well as offers suggestions on how to end hunger, starvation, and malnutrition. Everyone Eats feeds our need to understand human ecology by explaining the ways that cultures and political systems structure the edible environment.

This collection of essays examines obesity not as an objective medical or psychological problem, but as a subjective social and cultural phenomenon. The contributors take a cross-cultural perspective, examining both the negative casting of obesity in developed countries and the traditional view of obesity as a positive characteristic in subsistence societies which is threatened by the dominance of Western culture.

Who can deny the significance of food? It has a central role in our health and pleasure as well as in our economy, politics and culture. Food in Society provides a social science perspective on food systems and demonstrates the rich variety of disciplinary and theoretical contexts of food studies. While hunger and malnutrition remain a reality in many countries, for some food has become an experience rather than a sustenance. This book addresses the different worldwide understandings of food through thematic chapters and a wide range of material including: description of the political economy of the food chain, from production to the point of sale; analysis of global issues of supply and demand; critical debate of environmental and health aspects of food, including GM food, the role of habits, taboos, age and gender in food consumption. Each chapter contains a guide to further reading and to websites of relevance to food. Extensively illustrated, this book is essential reading for students of food studies in the social sciences and humanities.