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Book details

Taking food public

redefining foodways in a changing world

by Psyche A. Williams-Forson, Carole Counihan

Published 2011635 pagesISBN 978-0-4158-8854-7

"The field of food studies has been growing rapidly over the last thirty years and has exploded since the turn of the century. Scholars from an array of disciplines have trained fresh theoretical and methodological approaches onto new dimensions of the human relationship to food. This anthology capitalizes on this particular cultural moment to bring to the fore recent scholarship from some new and established voices and that have been pushing the limits of the field into ever more fascinating and innovative directions. Taking Food Public is organized into five interrelated sections: food production, consumption, performance, diasporas, and activism. The articles in this reader aim to provide new perspectives on the changing meanings and uses of food in the twenty-first century.This book integrates understandings of race, class, gender, region, sexuality and ethnic/national identity into the human experience of food. Taking Food Public also examines how this experience is manifested in extraordinary forms of food production and consumption (in mass media performances of cooking and eating, redefinitions of foodways throughout Diasporas, identities around food, and in food activism).Most important, this bewildering array of new academic insights into food and culture as well as the wealth of new food trends and food issues around the world cries out for original ways to frame, organize, and help teach these new developments. Here are the right Editors to help write original, teachable, foundational essays and otherwise organize this disparate, exciting new material into a coherent whole"--

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.

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Themes to notice

Nonfiction

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Content notes

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Reading experience

Balanced tone · Steady pace

Best when you want to settle into a longer reading experience.

Who it may suit

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Readers looking for a substantial, immersive commitment with room for a world or argument to unfold.

At a glance

This book's DNA

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ToneBalanced
LuminousDark

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Spoiler-Free Emotional Arc

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PeakRelative emotional intensity
Taking food publicPsyche A. Williams-Forson, Carole Counihan
Heightened4.2/5

This visualization is an interpretive estimate based on catalog description, categories, tone, pace, and content signals. It does not describe specific scenes.

Before you choose

A quick reading snapshot

Edition facts and catalog signals to help you decide whether this book fits what you want to read next.

Reading lengthA longer, immersive read635 pages in this edition
Publication eraModernFirst published or edition dated 2011
Primary categoryNonfictionExplore similar books below
ISBN-13
978-0-4158-8854-7
Language
English
Edition record
OL25170333M
BookenDeX editorial lens

A more thoughtful way into this book

This guide uses the edition details and category signals above to help you choose deliberately. It does not replace the author's work or a full review.

Good to know

Best when you want to settle into a longer reading experience.

Begin with its place in Nonfiction, then notice where the book resists that label.

Try this reading approach

Read for connection, not completion.

Mark one passage that sharpens the book's central concern and one that complicates it. That tension often reveals more than a quick summary.

Three questions to carry with you

  1. Whose perspective organizes the story, and whose perspective remains outside it?
  2. Which sources or lived experiences carry the author’s central argument?
  3. How does the book change the way you understand its larger subject?

Editorial framework by Wesley Bryan, BookenDeX Founder and Editor.