Appetites And Anxieties

Cinema is a mosaic of memorable food scenes. Detectives drink alone. Gangsters talk with their mouths full. Families around the world argue at dinner. Food documentaries challenge popular consumption-centered visions. In Appetites and Anxieties: Food, Film, and the Politics of Representation, authors Cynthia Baron, Diane Carson, and Mark Bernard use a foodways paradigm, drawn from the fields of folklore and cultural anthropology, to illuminate film's cultural and material politics. In looking at how films do and do not represent food procurement, preparation, presentation, consumption, clean-up, and disposal, the authors bring the pleasures, dangers, and implications of consumption to center stage. In nine chapters, Baron, Carson, and Bernard consider food in fiction films and documentaries-from both American and international cinema. The first chapter examines film practice from the foodways perspective, supplying a foundation for the collection of case studies that follow. Chapter 2 takes a political economy approach as it examines the food industry and the film industry's policies that determine representations of food in film. In chapter 3, the authors explore food and food interactions as a means for creating community in Bagdad Café, while in chapter 4 they take a close look at 301/302, in which food is used to mount social critique. Chapter 5 focuses on cannibal films, showing how the foodways paradigm unlocks the implications of films that dramatize one of society's greatest food taboos. In chapter 6, the authors demonstrate ways that insights generated by the foodways lens can enrich genre and auteur studies. Chapter 7 considers documentaries about food and water resources, while chapter 8 examines food documentaries that slip through the cracks of film censorship by going into exhibition without an MPAA rating. Finally, in chapter 9, the authors study films from several national cinemas to explore the intersection of food, gender, and ethnicity. Four appendices provide insights from a food stylist, a selected filmography of fiction films and a filmography of documentaries that feature foodways components, and a list of selected works in food and cultural studies.

Despite government claims that food is safer and more readily available today than ever before, recent survey evidence demonstrates high levels of food-related anxiety among Western consumers. While chronic hunger and malnutrition are relatively rare in the West, food scares relating to individual products, concerns about global food security and other expressions of consumer anxiety about food remain widespread. Anxious Appetites explores the causes of these present-day anxieties. Looking at fears over provenance and regulation in a world of lengthening supply chains and greater concentration of corporate power, Peter Jackson investigates how anxieties about food circulate and how they act as a channel for broader social issues. Drawing on case studies such as the 2013 horsemeat scandal and fears about the contamination of infant formula in China in 2008, he examines how and why these concerns emerge. Comparing survey results with ethnographic observation of consumer practice, he explores the gap between official advice about food safety and people's everyday experience of food, including a critique of ideological notions of 'consumer choice'. A captivating, timely book which presents a new theory of social anxiety.

Despite government claims that food is safer and more readily available today than ever before, recent survey evidence demonstrates high levels of food-related anxiety among Western consumers. While chronic hunger and malnutrition are relatively rare in the West, food scares relating to individual products, concerns about global food security and other expressions of consumer anxiety about food remain widespread. Anxious Appetites explores the causes of these present-day anxieties. Looking at fears over provenance and regulation in a world of lengthening supply chains and greater concentration of corporate power, Peter Jackson investigates how anxieties about food circulate and how they act as a channel for broader social issues. Drawing on case studies such as the 2013 horsemeat scandal and fears about the contamination of infant formula in China in 2008, he examines how and why these concerns emerge. Comparing survey results with ethnographic observation of consumer practice, he explores the gap between official advice about food safety and people's everyday experience of food, including a critique of ideological notions of 'consumer choice'. A captivating, timely book which presents a new theory of social anxiety.

With contributions by: Barbara Banks, Sheila Bock, Susan Eleuterio, Jillian Gould, Phillis Humphries, Michael Owen Jones, Alicia Kristen, William G. Lockwood, Yvonne R. Lockwood, Lucy M. Long, LuAnne Roth, Rachelle H. Saltzman, Charlene Smith, Annie Tucker, and Diane Tye Comfort Food explores this concept with examples taken from Atlantic Canadians, Indonesians, the English in Britain, and various ethnic, regional, and religious populations as well as rural and urban residents in the United States. This volume includes studies of particular edibles and the ways in which they comfort or in some instances cause discomfort. The contributors focus on items ranging from bologna to chocolate, including sweet and savory puddings, fried bread with an egg in the center, dairy products, fried rice, cafeteria fare, sugary fried dough, soul food, and others. Several essays consider comfort food in the context of cookbooks, films, blogs, literature, marketing, and tourism. Of course what heartens one person might put off another, so the collection also includes takes on victuals that prove problematic. All this fare is then related to identity, family, community, nationality, ethnicity, class, sense of place, tradition, stress, health, discomfort, guilt, betrayal, and loss, contributing to and deepening our understanding of comfort food. This book offers a foundation for further appreciation of comfort food. As a subject of study, the comfort food is relevant to a number of disciplines, most obviously food studies, folkloristics, and anthropology, but also American studies, cultural studies, global and international studies, tourism, marketing, and public health.

As Matthew Fox notes, when an aged Albert Einstein was asked if he had any regrets, he replied, "I wish I had read more of the mystics earlier in my life." The 365 writings here allow readers of all faiths - and no faith - to experience these readings.

Divided into four thematic sections, What's Eating You? explores the deeper significance of food on screen-the ways in which they reflect (or challenge) our deepest fears about consuming and being consumed. Among the questions it asks are: How do these films mock our taboos and unsettle our notions about the human condition? How do they critique our increasing focus on consumption? In what ways do they hold a mirror to our taken-for-granteds about food and humanity, asking if what we eat truly matters? Horror narratives routinely grasp those questions and spin them into nightmares. Monstrous “others” dine on forbidden fare; the tables of consumption are turned, and the consumer becomes the consumed. Overindulgence, as Le Grande Bouffe (1973) and Street Trash (1987) warn, can kill us, and occasionally, as films like The Stuff (1985) and Poultrygeist (2006) illustrate, our food fights back. From Blood Feast (1963) to Sweeney Todd (2007), motion pictures have reminded us that it is an “eat or be eaten” world.

Matthew Williamson's book argues that the representation of hunger and appetite was central to political debate in early modern drama.

First published in 2006. Food, Morals and Meaning examines our need to discipline our desires, our appetites and our pleasures at the table. However, instead of seeing this discipline as dominant or oppressive it argues that a rationalisation of pleasure plays a positive role in our lives, allowing us to better understand who we are. The book begins by exploring the way that concerns about food, the body and pleasure were prefigured in antiquity and then how these concerns were recast in early Christianity as problems of 'natural' appetite which had to be curbed. The following chapters discuss how scientific knowledge about food was constructed out of philosophical and religious concerns about indulgence and excess in 18th and 19th Century Europe. Finally, by using research collected from in-depth interviews with families, the last section focuses on the social organisation of food in the modern home to illustrate the ways that the meal table now incorporates the principles of nutrition as a form of moral training, especially for children. Food, Morals and Meaning will be essential reading for those studying nutrition, public health, sociology of health and illness and sociology of the body.