Food ─ Ethnographic Encounters

Food preparation, consumption, and exchange are eminently social practices, and experiencing another cuisine often provides our first encounter with a different culture. This volume presents fascinating essays relating to food by anthropologists working in many parts of the world, exploring their experiences of hunger, pleasure, and disgust, and what they learned by eating with others.

From the rich metaphors for social life drawn from eating and drinking in Latin America, to the experience of refugees subsisting on food aid, this book covers a wide range of contemporary issues in anthropology, with a special focus on the experience and challenge of ethnographic fieldwork. Essays address linguistic and social acculturation through eating, the experience of scarcity, industrial food production and the threat of contamination, and ecology, identity, and social differentiation.

Food: Ethnographic Encounters offers readers a broad view of the vibrancy of local and global food cultures, and provides an accessible introduction to both food studies and contemporary ethnography.