Food Health And Identity

By addressing the issue of food and eating in Britain today this collection considers the ways in which food habits are changing and shows how social and personal identities and perceptions of health risk influence people's food choices. The articles explore, among other issues: • the family meal • wedding cakes • nostalgia and the invention of tradition • the rise of vegetarianism • the recent BSE crisis • the `creolization' of British food eating out • creation of individual identity through lifestyle. The contributors include Hanna Bradby, Simon Charsley, Allison James, Anne Keane, Lydia Martens and Alan Warde.

Due to its centrality in human activities, food is a meaningful object that necessarily participates in any cultural, social and ideological construction and its qualification as 'traditional' is a politically laden value. This book demonstrates that traditionality as attributed to foods goes beyond the notions of heritage and authenticity under which it is commonly formulated. Through a series of case studies from a global range of cultural and geographical areas, the book explores a variety of contexts to reveal the complexity behind the attribution of the term 'traditional' to food. In particular, the volume demonstrates that the definitions put forward by programmes such as TRUEFOOD and EuroFIR (and subsequently adopted by organisations including FAO), which have analysed the perception of traditional foods by individuals, do not adequately reflect this complexity. The concept of tradition being deeply ingrained culturally, socially, politically and ideologically, traditional foods resist any single definition. Chapters analyse the processes of valorisation, instrumentalisation and reinvention at stake in the construction and representation of a food as traditional. Overall the book offers fresh perspectives on topics including definition and regulation, nationalism and identity, and health and nutrition, and will be of interest to students and researchers of many disciplines including anthropology, sociology, politics and cultural studies.

By addressing the issue of food and eating in Britain today this collection considers the ways in which food habits are changing and shows how social and personal identities and perceptions of health risk influence people's food choices. The articles explore, among other issues: • the family meal • wedding cakes • nostalgia and the invention of tradition • the rise of vegetarianism • the recent BSE crisis • the `creolization' of British food eating out • creation of individual identity through lifestyle. The contributors include Hanna Bradby, Simon Charsley, Allison James, Anne Keane, Lydia Martens and Alan Warde.

The intersection of food and immigration in North America, from the macroscale of national policy to the microscale of immigrants' lived, daily foodways. This volume considers the intersection of food and immigration at both the macroscale of national policy and the microscale of immigrant foodways—the intimate, daily performances of identity, culture, and community through food.

Aspects of the urban food truck phenomenon, including community economic development, regulatory issues, and clashes between ethnic authenticity and local sustainability. The food truck on the corner could be a brightly painted old-style lonchera offering tacos or an upscale mobile vendor serving lobster rolls. Customers range from gastro-tourists to construction workers, all eager for food that is delicious, authentic, and relatively inexpensive. Although some cities that host food trucks encourage their proliferation, others throw up regulatory roadblocks. This book examines the food truck phenomenon in North American cities from Los Angeles to Montreal, taking a novel perspective: social justice. It considers the motivating factors behind a city's promotion or restriction of mobile food vending, and how these motivations might connect to or impede broad goals of social justice. The contributors investigate the discriminatory implementation of rules, with gentrified hipsters often receiving preferential treatment over traditional immigrants; food trucks as part of community economic development; and food trucks' role in cultural identity formation. They describe, among other things, mobile food vending in Portland, Oregon, where relaxed permitting encourages street food; the criminalization of food trucks by Los Angeles and New York City health codes; food as cultural currency in Montreal; social and spatial bifurcation of food trucks in Chicago and Durham, North Carolina; and food trucks as a part of Vancouver, Canada's, self-branding as the “Greenest City.” Contributors Julian Agyeman, Sean Basinski, Jennifer Clark, Ana Croegaert, Kathleen Dunn, Renia Ehrenfeucht, Emma French, Matthew Gebhardt, Phoebe Godfrey, Amy Hanser, Robert Lemon, Nina Martin, Caitlin Matthews, Nathan McClintock, Alfonso Morales, Alan Nash, Katherine Alexandra Newman, Lenore Lauri Newman, Alex Novie, Matthew Shapiro, Hannah Sobel, Mark Vallianatos, Ginette Wessel, Edward Whittall, Mackenzie Wood

This compelling collection of original essays explores food and identity in the Caribbean, focusing on contemporary political and economic changes which impact upon culinary identities.

Food and eating has always been endowed with meanings. It is one of the most visible and important symbols of identity and difference, uniting the members of a community and segregating them from other communities. This inclusion and exclusion can be observed not only in what they eat or what they are known to eat, but also how they eat, how they prepare and serve their food, and what happens after food is taken. The study of food politics and questions of identity and difference can, therefore, be a means of understanding the underlying social relations in any culture and its quiescent philosophy. This ethnographic work discusses the politics inherent in food among the Garos of Assam (India) and Bangladesh. In these two areas, they live as a minority, and with and in the peripheries of a dominant non-Garo culture. Thus, this book examines the ways in which Garos conceptualize themselves and the ‘other’ world through the microcosm of food – the most important need of all. It discusses, among other topics, how the concepts of Garo food versus non-Garo food find fruition in social reality and collective memory, as an identity marker.

Examines historical and cultural knowledge of traditional Indigenous foodways that are rooted in an understanding of environmental stewardship.