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Celebrating World Food Day

World Food Day is celebrated each year on October 16th to promote worldwide awareness and action for those who suffer from hunger and for the need to ensure food security and nutritious diets for all.

To mark this date, we are delighted to feature a selection of related titles in Food and Nutrition.


Anthropology of Food & Nutrition Series

This series brings together the broad range of perspectives on human food, encompassing social, cultural and nutritional aspects of food habits, beliefs, choices and technologies in different regions and societies, past and present. Each volume features cross-disciplinary and international perspectives on the topic of its title. This multidisciplinary approach is particularly relevant to the study of food-related issues in the contemporary world.

PURE FOOD

Theoretical and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Edited by Paul Collinson and Helen Macbeth

In presenting a variety of theoretical and cross-cultural perspectives on pure food, this volume demonstrates similarities and variations in cultural beliefs, behaviours and practices in different societies. These in turn highlight that pure food is a common issue for humanity, whatever the society, whatever the era.

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EDIBLE PEOPLE
The Historical Consumption of Slaves and Foreigners and the Cannibalistic Trade in Human Flesh

Christian Siefkes

While human cannibalism has attracted considerable notice and controversy, certain aspects of the practice have received scant attention. These include the connection between cannibalism and xenophobia: the capture and consumption of unwanted strangers. Likewise ignored is the connection to slavery: the fact that in some societies slaves and persons captured in slave raids could be, and were, killed and eaten. This book explores these largely forgotten practices and ignored connections while making explicit the links between cannibal acts, imperialist influences and the role of capitalist trading practices.

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FOOD CONNECTIONS
Production, Exchange and Consumption in West African Migration

Maria Abranches

Food Connections follows the movement of food from its production sites in West Africa to its final spaces of consumption in Europe. It is an ethnographic study of economic and social life amongst a close-knit community of food producers, traders and consumers and a wide range of small intermediaries that operate in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal. 

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New in Paperback!

FOOD AND SUSTAINABILITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

Edited by Paul Collinson, Iain Young, Lucy Antal, and Helen Macbeth

Using cross-disciplinary perspectives from international scholars working in social, cultural and biological anthropology, ecology and environmental biology, this volume brings many new perspectives to the problems we face.  Its cross-disciplinary framework of chapters with local, regional and continental perspectives provides a global outlook on sustainability issues.

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For a full selection of volumes browse series webpage.

Food, Nutrition, and Culture Series

While eating is a biological necessity, the production, distribution, preparation, consumption, and disposal of food are all deeply culturally inscribed activities. Taking an anthropological perspective, this book series provides a forum for critically engaged, ethnographically grounded work on the cultural, social, political, economic, and ecological aspects of human nutrition and food habits.

Forthcoming April 2024!
FOOD AND FAMILIES IN THE MAKING
Knowledge Reproduction and Political Economy of Cooking in Morocco

Katharina Graf

Through the lens of domestic food preparation, this book looks at knowledge reproduction on how we know cooking and its role in the making of everyday family life. It also examines a political economy of cooking that situates Marrakchi women’s lived experience in the broader context of persisting poverty and food insecurity in Morocco.

NOURISHING LIFE
Foodways and Humanity in an African Town

Arianna Huhn

“…offers important insights into what it is that people in sub-Saharan Africa have over time produced, traded, and consumed… This book is a valuable contribution to the study of commodity chains and will be useful for any persons interested in expanding their knowledge of commodities, capitalism, consumption, African history, environmental studies, and foodways.” • African Studies Review

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In Paperback!
THE DANCE OF NURTURE
Negotiating Infant Feeding
Penny Van Esterik and Richard A. O’Connor

The Dance of Nurture integrates ethnography, biology and the political economy of infant feeding into a holistic framework guided by the metaphor of dance. It includes a critique of efforts to improve infant feeding practices globally by UN agencies and advocacy groups concerned with solving global nutrition and health problems.

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For a full selection of volumes browse series webpage

Of Related Interest

BREWING SOCIALISM
Coffee, East Germans, and Twentieth-Century Globalization

Andrew Kloiber

Placing coffee at the center of its analysis, Brewing Socialism links East Germany’s consumption and food culture to its relationship to the wider world. Andrew Kloiber reveals the ways that everyday cultural practices surrounding coffee drinking not only connected East Germans to a global system of exchange, but also perpetuated a set of traditions and values which fit uneasily into the Socialist Unity Party’s conceptualization of a modern Socialist Utopia.

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WINE IS OUR BREAD
Labour and Value in Moldovan Winemaking

Daniela Ana

Based on ethnographic work in a Moldovan winemaking village, Wine Is Our Bread shows how workers in a prestigious winery have experienced the country’s recent entry into the globalized wine market and how their productive activities at home and in the winery contribute to the value of commercial terroir wines.

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FEEDING ANXIETIES
The Politics of Children’s Food in Poland

Zofia Boni

With rich ethnographic accounts, including research with children, the book demonstrates how families, schools, the food industry and state agencies shape and experience feeding anxieties, and how such anxiety is at the heart of a new form of sociality. The book complicates our understanding of health and modern subjectivity and unpacks what and how we feed children today.

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Paperbacks

NOURISHING THE NATION
Food as National Identity in Catalonia

Venetia Johannes

In the early twenty-first century, nationalism has seen a surprising resurgence across the Western world. In the Catalan Autonomous Community in northeastern Spain, this resurgence has been most apparent in widespread support for Catalonia’s pro-independence movement, and the popular assertion of Catalan symbols, culture and identity in everyday life. Nourishing the Nation provides an ethnographic account of the everyday experience of national identity in Catalonia, using an essential, everyday object of consumption: food.

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MATSUTAKE WORLDS
Edited by Lieba Faier and Michael J. Hathaway

The matsutake mushroom continues to be a highly sought delicacy, especially in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cuisine. Matsutake Worlds explores this mushroom through the lens of multi-species encounters centered around the matsutake’s notorious elusiveness.

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BIGGER FISH TO FRY

A Theory of Cooking as Risk, with Greek Examples

David E. Sutton

Richly illustrated with examples from the author’s anthropology fieldwork in Greece, Bigger Fish to Fry proposes a new approach to the meaning of cooking and how the study of cooking can reshape our understanding of social processes more generally.

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Research Methods for Anthropological Studies of Food and Nutrition

Volumes 1–3
Edited by Janet Chrzan and John A. Brett

Published in association with the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition (SAFN) and in collaboration with Rachel Black and Leslie Carlin.

These volumes offer a comprehensive reference for students and established scholars interested in food and nutrition research in Nutritional and Biological Anthropology, Archaeology, Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology, Food Studies and Applied Public Health.

FOOD RESEARCH
Nutritional Anthropology and Archaeological Methods

“All chapters are brief and very well focused, outlining the methods and current issues with each specific approach to data collection…This book set will be an excellent guide for all food scholars.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

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FOOD CULTURE
Anthropology, Linguistics and Food Studies

“In sum, Food Culture is a useful resource text, especially for teaching. Each chapter is well written and organised in a way that is easy for the reader to access; they give robust and clear overviews of methodological approaches, contextualise these theoretically, and provide examples and case studies of how they can be used…” • Anthropos

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FOOD HEALTH
Nutrition, Technology, and Public Health


This volume provides in-depth analysis and comprehensive review of methods necessary to design, plan, implement and analyze public health programming related to food and nutrition using anthropological best practices.

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Berghahn Journals

Enjoy FREE Access to the following articles until Oct 23! Use code FOODDAY. Redemption details here: bit.ly/3F5lmqg

ENVIROMENT AND SOCIETY

Special Issue: Environment, Society, and Food (Vol. 2)

NATURE AND CULTURE

Certification Regimes in the Global Agro-Food System and the Transformation of the Nature-Society Relationship: Ecological Modernization or Modernization of Ecology?
Md Saidul Islam (Vol. 17, Issue 1)

Special Issue: Civil Society and Urban Agriculture in Europe (Vol. 13, Issue 3)

Open Access Articles

ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE MIDDLE EAST
Using Direct Observation to Examine the Relationship between Smoking and Consumption Patterns in a Middle Eastern Food Services Setting Richard A. Heiens and Larry P. Pleshko (Vol 18, Issue 1)

Special Issue: Food and Cooking in the Middle East and North Africa (Vol. 15, Issue 2)

ENVIROMENT AND SOCIETY

We All We Got: Urban Black Ecologies of Care and Mutual Aid
Ashanté M. Reese and Symone A. Johnson (Vol. 13)

SIBIRICA

Arctic “Laboratory” of Food Resources in the Allaikhovskii District of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia)
Nikolai Goncharov (Vol. 21, Issue 2)

SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY/ANTHROPOLOGIE SOCIALE

‘Eating with the People’: How a Chinese Hydropower Project Changed Food Experiences in a Lao Community*
Floramante SJ Ponce (Vol. 30, Issue 1)


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