Careful Eating ─ Bodies, Food and Care

Critically reflecting on the interplays between food and care, this multidisciplinary volume asks a€?why do individuals, institutions and agencies care about what other people eat?a€? It explores how acts of caring about food and eating shape and intervene in individual bodies as well as being enacted in and through those bodies. In so doing, the volume extends current critical debates regarding food and care as political mechanisms through which social hierarchies are constructed and both self and 'other' (re)produced. Addressing the ways in which eating and caring interact on multiple scales and sites - from public health and clinical settings to the market, the home and online communities - Careful Eating asks what a€?eatinga€? and a€?caringa€? are, what relationships they create and rupture, and how their interplay is experienced in myriad spaces of everyday life. Taking account of this two-directional flow of engagement between eating and caring, the chapters are organized into three central theoretical dimensions: how eating practices mobilize discourses and forms of care; how discourses and practices of care (look to) shape particular forms of eating and food preferences; and how it is often in the bodies of individual consumers that eating and care encounter one another.

Emma-Jayne Abbots is Senior Lecturer in Social/Cultural Anthropology and Heritage at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David (Lampeter) and Research Associate at SOAS Food Studies Centre, University of London, UK. Anna Lavis is Research Fellow at the School of Health and Population Sciences, University of Birmingham and Research Associate at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK. Luci Attala is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David (Lampeter) and Associate Lecturer in Health and Social Care at the Open University, UK.