Food & Material Culture


Book Description

Contains essays on food and material culture presented at the 2013 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.




Food and the Self


Book Description

We often hear that selves are no longer formed through producing material things at work, but by consuming them in leisure, leading to 'meaningless' modern lives. This important book reveals the cultural shift to be more complex, demonstrating how people in postindustrial societies strive to form meaningful and moral selves through both the consumption and production of material culture in leisure. Focusing on the material culture of food, the book explores these theoretical questions through an ethnography of those individuals for whom food is central to their self: 'foodies'. It examines what foodies do, and why they do it, through an in-depth study of their lived experiences. The book uncovers how food offers a means of shaping the self not as a consumer but as an amateur who engages in both the production and consumption of material culture and adopts a professional approach which reveals the new moralities of productive leisure in self-formation. The chapters examine a variety of practices, from fine dining and shopping to cooking and blogging, and include rare data on how people use media such as cookbooks, food television, and digital food media in their everyday life. This book is ideal for students, scholars, and anyone interested in the meaning of food in modern life.




Food and Material Culture


Book Description

The Commission is a multidisciplinary working group, organizing biennial symposia on substantive issues in food history, with emphasis on the 19th & 20th centuries. The 19 contributions from 10 countries published here are all concerned with historical developments in food & nutrition-related aspects of material culture, with reference to thematic & regional case studies. The papers are divided into 3 areas: The Kitchen, The Table, & New Technologies. They begin with the hearth & stove & proceed via table settings to industrial food production, such as methods of processing, preservation & packaging, including distribution structures. Illustrations.




Food Waste


Book Description

In recent years, food waste has risen to the top of the political and public agenda, yet until now there has been no scholarly analysis applied to the topic as a complement and counter-balance to campaigning and activist approaches. Using ethnographic material to explore global issues, Food Waste unearths the processes that lie behind the volume of food currently wasted by households and consumers. The author demonstrates how waste arises as a consequence of households negotiating the complex and contradictory demands of everyday life, explores the reasons why surplus food ends up in the bin, and considers innovative solutions to the problem. Drawing inspiration from studies of consumption and material culture alongside social science perspectives on everyday life and the home, this lively yet scholarly book is ideal for students and researchers from a wide range of disciplines, along with anyone interested in understanding the food that we waste.




The Bloomsbury Handbook of Food and Material Cultures


Book Description

Cookbooks. Menus. Ingredients. Dishes. Pots. Kitchens. Markets. Museum exhibitions. These objects, representations, and environments are part of what the volume calls the material cultures of food. The book features leading scholars, professionals, and chefs who apply a material cultural perspective to consider two relatively unexplored questions: 1) What is the material culture of food? and 2) How are frameworks, concepts, and methods of material culture used in scholarly research and professional practice? This book acknowledges that materiality is historically and culturally specific (local), but also global, as food both transcends and collapses geographical and ideological borders. Contributors capture the malleability of food, its material environments and “stuff,” and its representations in media, museums, and marketing, while following food through cycles of production, circulation, and consumption. As many of the featured authors explore, food and its many material and immaterial manifestations not only reflect social issues, but also actively produce, preserve, and disrupt identities, communities, economic systems, and everyday social practices. The volume includes contributions from and interviews with a dynamic group of scholars, museum and information professionals, and chefs who represent diverse disciplines, such as communication studies, anthropology, history, American studies, folklore, and food studies.




Food and Material Culture


Book Description




Table Settings


Book Description

Fernand Braudel famously observed that the 'mere smell of cooking can evoke a whole civilization'. The way that food is prepared, served, and eaten reveals a great deal about the structure and workings of any society. It is therefore not surprising that food, and the culturally specific etiquettes and equipment that surround the act of eating have been studied by scholars from a wide range of disciplines. The papers in this volume consider the changes that occurred in Old and New World dining and related culinary activities between the 17th century and the early 20th century. This period saw the widespread acceptance of the fork in dining and the adoption of routinized etiquettes to govern eating. In the 18th century the rise of individualism ushered in new forms of segmented dining based upon symmetrically arranged tables and individual place settings. Against this backdrop of manufactured uniformity, made possible by advances in industrial production, highly stylized dining rituals and haute cuisine, which had previously been the exclusive domain of European courtly elites, entered the homes and routines of the 'middling sort'. Henceforth, material expressions of status and social identity became commonplace at the table, and an integral part of dining in all but the humblest homes. The unique contribution of this volume lies in the way in which a distinguished group of international historical archaeologists have combined the richness of primary archaeological evidence with a wealth of documentary evidence to create insightful new material histories of dining. The new light which this throws upon manufacturing processes, feasting rituals, the rise of respectability, the inter-continental spread of the Victorian cult of domesticity, and foodways among peripheral agricultural communities will be of interest to scholars beyond archaeology, in the cognate fields of anthropology, social and economic history, cultural geography, and material culture studies.




Objectifying China, Imagining America


Book Description

With the ever-expanding presence of China in the global economy, Americans more and more look east for goods and trade. But as Caroline Frank reveals, this is not a new development. China loomed as large in the minds—and account books—of eighteenth-century Americans as it does today. Long before they had achieved independence from Britain and were able to sail to Asia themselves, American mariners, merchants, and consumers were aware of the East Indies and preparing for voyages there. Focusing on the trade and consumption of porcelain, tea, and chinoiserie, Frank shows that colonial Americans saw themselves as part of a world much larger than just Britain and Europe Frank not only recovers the widespread presence of Chinese commodities in early America and the impact of East Indies trade on the nature of American commerce, but also explores the role of the this trade in American state formation. She argues that to understand how Chinese commodities fueled the opening acts of the Revolution, we must consider the power dynamics of the American quest for china—and China—during the colonial period. Filled with fresh and surprising insights, this ambitious study adds new dimensions to the ongoing story of America’s relationship with China.




Global Brooklyn


Book Description

What do the fashionable food hot spots of Cape Town, Mumbai, Copenhagen, Rio de Janeiro, and Tel Aviv have in common? Despite all their differences, consumers in each major city are drawn to a similar atmosphere: rough wooden tables in postindustrial interiors lit by edison bulbs. There, they enjoy single-origin coffee, kombucha, and artisanal bread. This is 'Global Brooklyn,' a new transnational aesthetic regime of urban consumption. It may look shabby and improvised, but it is all carefully designed. It may romance the analog, but is made to be Instagrammed. It often references the New York borough, but is shaped by many networked locations where consumers participate in the global circulation of styles, flavors, practices, and values. This book follows this phenomenon across different world cities, arguing for a stronger appreciation of design and materialities in understanding food cultures. Attentive to local contexts, struggles, and identities, contributors explore the global mobility of aesthetic, ethical, and entrepreneurial projects, and how they materialize in everyday practices on the ground. They describe new connections among eating, drinking, design, and communication in order to give a clearer sense of the contemporary transformations of food cultures around the world.




Re-orienting Cuisine


Book Description

Foods are changed not only by those who produce and supply them, but also by those who consume them. Analyzing food without considering changes over time and across space is less meaningful than analyzing it in a global context where tastes, lifestyles, and imaginations cross boundaries and blend with each other, challenging the idea of authenticity. A dish that originated in Beijing and is recreated in New York is not necessarily the same, because although authenticity is often claimed, the form, ingredients, or taste may have changed. The contributors of this volume have expanded the discussion of food to include its social and cultural meanings and functions, thereby using it as a way to explain a culture and its changes.