Food for Thought: Essays on Eating and Culture

by Lawrence C. Rubin

Overview

Historically, few topics have attracted as much scholarly, professional, or popular attention as food and eating—as one might expect, considering the fundamental role of food in basic human survival. Almost daily, a new food documentary, cooking show, diet program, food guru, or eating movement arises to challenge yesterday's dietary truths and the ways we think about dining.

This work brings together voices from a wide range of disciplines, providing a fascinating feast of scholarly perspectives on food and eating practices, contemporary and historic, local and global. Nineteen essays cover a vast array of food-related topics, including the ever-increasing problems of agricultural globalization, the contemporary mass-marketing of a formerly grassroots movement for organic food production, the Food Network's successful mediation of social class, the widely popular phenomenon of professional competitive eating and current trends in "culinary tourism" and fast food advertising.

Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786435500
Publisher:	McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers
Publication date:	05/02/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	315
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.63(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Lawrence C. Rubin is a professor of counselor education at St. Thomas University in Miami, Florida, and a practicing psychologist. He lives in Pompano Beach.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments     
Foreword by John Shelton Lawrence     
Introduction    

PART I. FROM PRE–MODERNITY TO THE HYPERMODERN AGE
1. Man, Machine and Refined Dining in Victorian America     
Hillary Murtha
2. Shopping for What Never Was: The Rhetoric of Food, Social Style and Nostalgia     
Carlnita Greene
3. All You Can Eat: Sociological Reflections on Food in the Hypermodern Era     
Simon Gottschalk

PART II. EAT LOCALLY, THINK GLOBALLY
4. Raising the Bar: The Complicated Consumption of Chocolate     
Ellen E. Moore
5. The Espresso Revolution: Introducing Coffee-Bar Franchising to Modern China     
Jackie Cook and Robert Lee
6. Mass Agrarianism: Wal-Mart and Organic Foods     
Dawn Gilpin

PART III. ENTERTAINING FOOD AND EATING
7. “Everybody Eats”: The Food Network and Symbolic Capital     
Megan Mullen
8. Semiotic Sound Bites: Toward an Alimentary Analysis of Popular Song     
Christopher Joseph Westgate
9. Hunger and Satiety in Latin American Literature     
Santiago Daydi-Tolson

PART IV. WE ARE WHERE WE EAT
10. Reengineering “Authenticity”: Tourism Encounters with Cuisine in Rural Great Britain     
Craig Wight
11. Passing Time: The Ironies of Food in Prison Culture     
Jim Thomas
12. Selfish Consumers: Delmonico’s Restaurant and Learning to Satisfy Personal Desire     
Heather Lee
13. Is it Really Better to Travel Than to Arrive? Airline Food as a Reflection of Consumer Anxiety     
Guillaume de Syon

PART V. COME JOIN US
14. Deconstructing the Myth of the Dysfunctional Black Family in the Film Soul Food     
Tina M. Harris
15. Cultural Representation of Taste in Ang Lee’s Eat, Drink, Man, Woman     
Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley

PART VI. EAT, DRINK AND BE PUBLIC
16. Snacking as Ritual: Eating Behavior in Public Places Phillip Vannini    
17. Beyond Bread and Circuses: Professional Competitive Eating     
Lawrence C. Rubin

PART VII. SELF-REFLECTION IN A FUN–HOUSE MIRROR
18. “Gourmandizing,” Gluttony and Oral Fixations: Perspectives on Overeating in the American Journal of Psychiatry, 1844 to the Present     
Dr. Mallay Occhiogrosso
19. Having It His Way: The Construction of Masculinity in Fast-Food TV Advertising     
Carrie Packwood Freeman and Debra Merskin

Afterword by Lawrence C. Rubin     
About the Contributors     
Index     

Editorial Reviews

uesful...recommended”—Choice; “a veritable smorgasbord of information...offers a significant amount of information about the multifaceted and ever-changing discourse of foodways...excellent, well researched”—Journal of Popular Culture; “addresses obsessions with food...unexpected and novel entries”—Booklist.

From the Publisher

"addresses obsessions with food...unexpected and novel entries"

Booklist

a veritable smorgasbord of information...offers a significant amount of information about the multifaceted and ever-changing discourse of foodways...excellent, well researched

Journal of Popular Culture

uesful...recommended

Choice