Described in the 2008 Saveur 100 as "At the top of our bedside reading pile since its inception in 2001," the award-winning Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture is a quarterly feast of truly exceptional writing on food. Designed both to entertain and to provoke, The Gastronomica Reader now offers a sumptuous sampling from the journal’s pages—including essays, poetry, interviews, memoirs, and an outstanding selection of the artwork that has made Gastronomica so distinctive. In words and images, it takes us around the globe, through time, and into a dazzling array of cultures, investigating topics from early hominid cooking to Third Reich caterers to the Shiite clergy under Ayatollah Khomeini who deemed Iranian caviar fit for consumption under Islamic law. Informed throughout by a keen sense of the pleasures of eating, tasting, and sharing food, The Gastronomica Reader will inspire readers to think seriously, widely, and deeply about what goes onto their plates. Gastronomica is a winner of the Utne Reader's Independent Press Award for Social/Cultural Coverage

"Rarefied but unpretentious, each issue is an artfully curated collection of essays, poems, art, and journalistic reportage. . . . Gastronomica's fare never fails to nourish us." --Saveur magazine "I am so impressed with this journal. It indicates an accuracy and diversity of information and style that will inspire and encourage people to pay attention to what they are eating."--Alice Waters "Food, even more than sex, is the basis for human relationships, and if Brillat-Savarin's 'Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are' is right, Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture will enhance your life and improve your relationships with your family and your friends."--Jacques Pépin "Gastronomica deserves the food world's attention." --Paul Levy "A food journal of high standards that takes on substantive food issues."--Patricia Unterman "Interacting with so many disciplines, Gastronomica will assure a fine intellectual menu and reinvigorate the worlds of food and culture with ever higher standards of scholarship."--Anne Willan "[One of] my top food favorites from 2008. . . . A delightful study of all things food, even those that touch the world of food in a peripheral way."--The Zest, food blog

From Thanksgiving to fast food to the Passover seder, Food in the USA brings together the essential readings on these topics and is the only substantial collection of essays on food and culture in the United States. Essay topics include the globalization of U.S. food; the dangers of the meatpacking industry; the rise of Italian-American food; the meaning of Soul food; the anorexia epidemic; the omnipotence of Coca-Cola; and the invention of Thanksgiving. Together, the collection provides a fascinating look at how and why we Americans are what we eat.

This reader reveals how food habits and beliefs both present a microcosm of any culture and contribute to our understanding of human behaviour. Particular attention is given to how men and women define themselves differently through food choices.

With a new preface and a new epilogue co-written with Jorge Ramirez-Lopez, this updated edition of Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies provides an intimate examination of the everyday lives, suffering, and resistance of Mexican migrants in our contemporary food system. Seth Holmes, an anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes was invited to trek with his companions clandestinely through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with them before they were deported. He lived with Indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the United States, planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This “embodied anthropology” deepens our theoretical understanding of the ways in which social inequities come to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care. In a new epilogue, Holmes and Indigenous Oaxacan scholar Jorge Ramirez-Lopez provide a substantive update about the protagonists in the book, focusing on the ways in which they have been involved individually and collectively in movements for Indigenous immigrant rights, farmworker rights, and the right to health over the last decade.

Over the last decade there has been an intense and widespread interest in the writing and publishing of cookery books; yet there remains surprisingly little contextualized analysis of the recipe as a generic form. This essay collection asserts that the recipe in all its cultural and textual contexts - from the quintessential embodiment of lifestyle choices to the reflection of artistic aspiration - is a complex, distinct and important form of cultural expression. In this volume, contributors address questions raised by the recipe, its context, its cultural moment and mode of expression. Examples are drawn from such diverse areas as: nineteenth and twentieth-century private publications, official government documents, campaigning literature, magazines, and fictions as well as cookery writers themselves, cookbooks and TV cookery. In subjecting the recipe to close critical analysis, The Recipe Reader serves to move the study of this cultural form forward. It will interest scholars of literature, popular culture, social history and women's studies as well as food historians and professional food writers. Written in an accessible style, this collection of essays expands the range of writers under consideration, and brings new perspectives, contexts and arguments into the existing field of debate about cookery writing.

American diners began to flock to Chinese restaurants more than a century ago, making Chinese food the first mass-consumed cuisine in the United States. By 1980, it had become the country's most popular ethnic cuisine. Chop Suey, USA offers the first comprehensive interpretation of the rise of Chinese food, revealing the forces that made it ubiquitous in the American gastronomic landscape and turned the country into an empire of consumption. Engineered by a politically disenfranchised, numerically small, and economically exploited group, Chinese food's tour de America is an epic story of global cultural encounter. It reflects not only changes in taste but also a growing appetite for a more leisurely lifestyle. Americans fell in love with Chinese food not because of its gastronomic excellence but because of its affordability and convenience, which is why they preferred the quick and simple dishes of China while shunning its haute cuisine. Epitomized by chop suey, American Chinese food was a forerunner of McDonald's, democratizing the once-exclusive dining-out experience for such groups as marginalized Anglos, African Americans, and Jews. The rise of Chinese food is also a classic American story of immigrant entrepreneurship and perseverance. Barred from many occupations, Chinese Americans successfully turned Chinese food from a despised cuisine into a dominant force in the restaurant market, creating a critical lifeline for their community. Chinese American restaurant workers developed the concept of the open kitchen and popularized the practice of home delivery. They streamlined certain Chinese dishes, such as chop suey and egg foo young, turning them into nationally recognized brand names.