Eating together is a powerful act, but what is it that brings people together around the table? Commensality: From Everyday Food to Feast gives readers a look at commensality from the perspectives of anthropology, sociology, archaeology, and historical research.

Describing a food chain as “farm to fork” may miss a crucial link: post-meal conversation. In Word of Mouth, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson assesses this gap in the food studies literature by examining the rhetoric of food, that which comes out of our mouths rather than in.

Eckart Woertz discusses various courses of action that governments in the Persian Gulf took in order to improve their countries’ food security after the 2008 global food crisis in Oil for Food. The extremely well-researched book takes a historical and political economic approach to examine food security in Gulf countries at a regional and national level.