Food exchange and consumption are central to the fieldwork experience. This book presents a highly engaging study of anthropologists' field encounters of preparing, producing, sharing, and consuming food.
Food preparation, consumption, and exchange are eminently social practices, and experiencing another cuisine often provides our first encounter with a different culture. This volume presents fascinating essays about cooking, eating, and sharing food, by anthropologists working in many parts of the world, exploring what they learned by eating with others.
These are accounts of specific experiences - of cooking in Mombasa, shopping for organic produce in Vienna, eating vegetarian in Vietnam, raising and selling chickens in Hong Kong, and of refugees subsisting on food aid. With a special focus on the experience and challenge of ethnographic fieldwork, the essays cover a wide range of topics in food studies and anthropology, including food safety and food security, cultural diversity and globalization, colonial histories and contemporary identities, and changing ecological, social, and political relations across cultures.
Food: Ethnographic Encounters offers readers a broad view of the vibrancy of local and global food cultures, and provides an accessible introduction to both food studies and contemporary ethnography.
This is an excellent sampler of recent ethnographic work on food. Most of the chapters take you deep into the significance of food and eating in an unfamiliar cultural setting. The book is accessible to anyone interested in food, though it is going to be most useful to serious students. This could be an excellent text for a course in the anthropology of food.
