What we learn when an anthropologist and a historian talk about food.
From the origins of agriculture to contemporary debates over culinary authenticity,
Ways of Eating introduces readers to world food history and food anthropology. Through engaging stories and historical deep dives, Benjamin A. Wurgaft and Merry I. White offer new ways to understand food in relation to its natural and cultural histories and the social rules that shape our meals.
Wurgaft and White use vivid storytelling to bring food practices to life, weaving stories of Panamanian coffee growers, medieval women beer makers, and Japanese knife forgers. From the Venetian spice trade to the Columbian Exchange, from Roman
garum to Vietnamese nớc chấm,
Ways of Eating provides an absorbing account of world food history and anthropology. Migration, politics, and the dynamics of group identity all shape what we eat, and we can learn to trace these social forces from the plate to the kitchen, the factory, and the field.
Table of Content
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
VIGNETTE 1 Duccio’s Eden
CHAPTER 1 Nature and Culture in the Origins Of Agriculture
VIGNETTE 2 Akashiyaki at Nishi-Akashi
CHAPTER 2 Staple Empires of the Ancient World
VIGNETTE 3 Coffee and Pepper
CHAPTER 3 Medieval Tastes
VIGNETTE 4 Before Kimchi
CHAPTER 4 The Columbian Exchange, or, the World Remade
VIGNETTE 5 The Spirit Safe
CHAPTER 5 Social Beverages and Modernity
VIGNETTE 6 Authenticity in Panama
CHAPTER 6 Colony and Curry
VIGNETTE 7 The Icebox
CHAPTER 7 Food’s Industrial Revolution
VIGNETTE 8 Bricolage
CHAPTER 8 Twentieth-Century Foodways, or, Big Food and Its Discontents
VIGNETTE 9 Nem on the Menu
CHAPTER 9 Ways of Eating
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Benjamin A. Wurgaft is a writer and historian. His previous books include Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food and Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt. Merry I. White is Professor of Anthropology at Boston University. Her previous books include Coffee Life in Japan and Perfectly Japanese: Making Families in an Era of Upheaval. The Japanese government has honored her work in the anthropology of Japan with the Order of the Rising Sun.
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