Rose Hayden-Smith’s inaugural book, Sowing the Seeds of Victory, contextualizes the World War I war garden efforts within various progressive reform agendas and situates home front gardens as crucial models for localized, nutrition-oriented food movements for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The Culinary Imagination: From Myth to Modernity is a book that has grown from Sandra M. Gilbert’s enduring interest in food and its representations, both as a scholar and as a poet. Tracing our fascination with food to myth and to fundamental facts of the food chain, The Culinary Imagination demonstrates that food has always been the site of paradox and conflict.
Keep writing, researching, and dreaming of food, and while you’re at it, no food puns! Carla Cevasco
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.
Food studies scholarship is full of food puns. I worry that these puns come to us easily—too easily—when we’re talking about food. Let me make a plea for a little more seriousness in a world where too many people dismiss our discipline and, for that matter, many others as a luxury.
