Kimura points out that something else is hidden in hunger discourses and practices: the voices of the very people who live with hunger, disease, and poverty, many of whom are women.

Everyone Eats draws on a nutritional context to explain the social and cultural reasons for why humans eat what they do. Anderson argues that consumption determines production by creating effective demand (4). The act of buying and acquiring food sparks particular interests.

Scrinis refers to a reductive focus on nutrient composition as “nutritionism” and illustrates how the concept shaped the practices of the food industry, nutritional science, dietary guidelines, and the public understanding of food in the past 150 years.

Featuring eleven essays penned by a veritable Who’s Who of food studies scholars, A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Age concludes the six-volume set edited by Fabio Parasecoli and Peter Scholliers that encompasses the cultural history of food from antiquity to the very near present. Focusing primarily on the West, Food in the Modern Age takes up the years from 1920 onward.

Jon Stobart persuasively shows that daily purchasing habits, procurement techniques, and modern retailing practices date as far back as long seventeenth century in Sugar & Spice: Grocers and Groceries in Provincial England.

George Solt’s ample narrative of the history of Japan’s beloved national food traces ramen from its origins as the calorie-rich sustenance of Chinese immigrants and manual laborers to a fashionable worldwide craze.

On one level, this book is a cross-disciplinary exploration of food and culture (Asian and Asian-American); on another, it is an intellectual yet personal yarn from a lover of all things edible whose background (Korean-American) and places of birth and residence (Los Angeles, Manhattan, and Hawaii) play a clear role in the choice of topic.

Eating Asian America addresses the question of why Asian and Asian-influenced food is an integral art of the American foodscape. The overwhelming Asian presence in the American foodscape is the result of external forces and inequalities that have restricted and defined Asians into an alimentary role.