Kategoria BISAC: Social Science >> Agriculture & Food (see also Political Science - Public Policy - Agricultur

In many contexts of Greek social life, Scotch whisky has coincidentally become a symbol of "Greekness," national identity, modernity, and the middle class. This ethnographic study follows the social life of Scotch in Greece through three distinct trajectories in time and space in order to investigate how the meanings of the beverage are projected, negotiated, and acquired by various different networks. By examining the mediascapes of the Greek cultural industry, the Athenian nightlife and entertainment, and the North Aegean drinking habits, the study illustrates how Scotch became...

Culinary Art and Anthropology is an anthropological study of food. It focuses on taste and flavor using an original interpretation of Alfred Gell's theory of the "art nexus." Grounded in ethnography, it explores the notion of cooking as an embodied skill and artistic practice. The integral role and concept of "flavor" in everyday life is examined among cottage industry barbacoa makers in Milpa Alta, an outer district of Mexico City. Women's work and local festive occasions are examined against a background of material on professional chefs who reproduce "traditional" Mexican cooking...

Literature, like food, is, in Terry Eagleton's words, endlessly interpretable, and food, like literature, looks like an object but is actually a relationship. So how much do we, and should we, read into the way food is represented in literature? Reading Food explores this and other questions in an unusual and fascinating tour of twentieth-century Japanese literature. Tomoko Aoyama analyzes a wide range of diverse writings that focus on food, eating, and cooking and considers how factors such as industrialization, urbanization, nationalism, and gender construction have affected people's...

As with other areas of human industry, it has been assumed that technological progress would improve all aspects of agriculture. Technology would increase both efficiency and yield, or so we thought. The directions taken by technology may have worked for a while, but the same technologies that give us an advantage also create disadvantages. It's now a common story in rural America: pesticides, fertilizers, "big iron" combines, and other costly advancements may increase speed but also reduce efficiency, while farmers endure debt, dangerous working conditions, and long hours to pay for the...

This is a book about the risk politics of food safety. Food-related risks regularly grab the headlines in ways that threaten reasoned debate and obstruct sensible policy making. In this book, Ed Randall explains why this is the case. He goes on to make the case for a properly informed and fully open public debate about food safety issues. He argues that this is the true antidote to the politics of scare, scandal and crisis.

The book skilfully weaves together the many different threads of food safety and risk politics and offers a particularly rewarding read for academics and students in...

The significance of food and feasting to Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures has been extensively studied by archaeologists, anthropologists and art historians. Foodways studies have been critical to our understanding of early agriculture, political economies, and the domestication and management of plants and animals. Scholars from diverse fields have explored the symbolic complexity of food and its preparation, as well as the social importance of feasting in contemporary and historical societies. This book unites these disciplinary perspectives - from the social and biological sciences...