Claudia Prieto-Piastro reviews Sarah Bowen’s “Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production,” which combines anthropological and historical methods to reveal the politics behind the increased popularity of tequila and mezcal production in Mexico.
Hannah C. Gunderman reviews Brigette Sebastia’s edited volume, “Eating Traditional Food: Politics, Identity, and Practices,” which examines the processes that produce notions of “traditional” foods, particularly within a global foodscape.
Josiah Taylor reviews Jessica Hayes-Conroy’s “Savoring Alternative Food: School Gardens, Healthy Eating, and Visceral Difference,” which reveals how social factors like culture, class, gender, and race contribute to exclude some people from the table.
Virginia Webb reviews Richard Ocejo’s “Masters of Craft: Old Jobs in the New Urban Economy,” which examines how lower status jobs (bartender, distiller, barber, and butcher) are being upscaled by educated urbanites in a post-industrial city.
In this fifth issue of the Journal, Editor-in-Chief Emily Contois seeks to define food studies and why it matters, particularly during our current political climate.
In the wake of the quinoa boom, hundreds of articles were published in the mainstream media regarding the ethicality of the transnational quinoa trade. In this article, Victoria Albert evaluates these pieces, and argues that simplistic dichotomies of good/bad and exploitative/not exploitative obscure more legitimate concerns regarding environmental degradation and socioeconomic inequality.
Kendall Vanderslice carries out an experiment inspired by autoethnographic technique and collective biography. In this article, she uses embodied research methods to discover the different ways four women feel friendships form over the course of four meals shared together, as well as how the sharing of spatial knowledge while cooking and eating together contributes to flows of power.
