In Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C., Ashanté M. Reese explores how Black communities are left behind in the urban renewal process due to racism, historical geographical segregation and disinvestment of Black neighborhoods, and how these communities navigate low food access. Often ignored by the literature on food access and food security are the coping mechanisms people in these conditions develop to acquire the foods they prefer or need or how people create meaning in the process of doing so.
Category Archive: Review
In “Burgundy: A Global Anthropology of Place and Taste,” Marion Demossier tackles the various socio-cultural, political, and professional practices surrounding the oenological region of Burgundy.
In “Pressure Cooker,” sociologists Sarah Bowen, Joslyn Brenton, and Sinikka Elliott set out to challenge dominant narratives about fixing the food system. By analyzing their ethnographic study of nine women, they reveal the complex factors that form a family’s eating habits.
Kevin Kosar’s “Moonshine: A Global History” explores the plethora of moonshines across time and space in an effort to disavow his readers of stereotypical American associations of moonshine and moonshiners.
In “Governing Bodies: American Politics and the Shaping of the Modern Physique,” Rachel Louise Moran draws from history and women’s studies to consider if the federal government should have a say in what you eat, or how a body should look.
Gitanjali G. Shahani’s edited collection “Food and Literature” prioritizes a variety of literary texts (not all Western-focused) to theorize the relationship between language and food, consumption as both reading practice and eating practice.
In “Every Nation Has Its Dish: Black Bodies & Black Food in Twentieth-Century America,” Jennifer Jensen Wallach thoughtfully links Black bodies and Black food consumption as a means of national inclusion and distancing.
In “Italian Food Activism in Urban Sardinia,” Carole Counihan examines the activities of numerous groups across the Mediterranean island, with particular focus on taste as a political and educational tool.
Iris Yellum reviews Benjamin Robert Siegel’s “Hungry Nation” (2018).
Divana Olivas reviews Devon G. Peña, Luz Calvo, Pancho McFarland, and Gabriel R. Valle’s “Mexican-Origin Foods, Foodways, and Social Movements” (2017).
