Food, Identities, and Inequalities
- An Annotated Bibliography on Structural Racism Present in the U.S. Food System, Ninth Edition (Michigan State University, Center for Regional Food Systems, March 14, 2022)
This annotated bibliography provides current research and outreach on structural racism in the U.S. food system for the food system practitioner, researcher, educator, and advocate.
- John Hopkins Center for a Livable Future
-
The new political battleground: Your restaurant receipt (The Washington Post, 2/14/17)
- Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (Non-profit organization)
-
World Hunger: Ten Myths (Food First.org, Institute for Food & Development Policy, 8/12/15))
Food Matters by
Food Matters explores central questions around the seemingly simple topic of food: what is food, exactly? Do we eat for sustenance, for health, for pleasure? Where does our food come from, and why should we care? What does it mean to eat ethically? Readings by a range of essayists, scientists, health researchers, philosophers, reporters, artists, and ordinary citizens take up these questions and more. Questions after each reading provide a range of activities for students. The Web site for the Spotlight Series offers comprehensive instructor support with sample syllabi and additional teaching resources. The Bedford Spotlight Reader Series is an exciting new line of single-theme readers, each featuring Bedford's trademark care and quality. The readers in the series collect carefully chosen readings sufficient for an entire writing course--about 30 selections--to allow instructors to provide carefully developed, high-quality instruction at an affordable price. Bedford Spotlight Readers are designed to help students make inquiries from multiple perspectives, opening up topics such as money, food, sustainability, and gender to critical analysis. The readers are flexibly arranged in thematic chapters, each focusing in depth on a different facet of the central topic. An Editorial Board of more than dozen compositionists at schools focusing on specific themes have assisted in the development of the series.
ISBN: 9781457660962Publication Date: 2014-01-24
Eating NAFTA by
Mexican cuisine has emerged as a paradox of globalization. Food enthusiasts throughout the world celebrate the humble taco at the same time that Mexicans are eating fewer tortillas and more processed food. Today Mexico is experiencing an epidemic of diet-related chronic illness. The precipitous rise of obesity and diabetes--attributed to changes in the Mexican diet--has resulted in a public health emergency. In her gripping new book, Alyshia Gálvez exposes how changes in policy following NAFTA have fundamentally altered one of the most basic elements of life in Mexico--sustenance. Mexicans are faced with a food system that favors food security over subsistence agriculture, development over sustainability, market participation over social welfare, and ideologies of self-care over public health. Trade agreements negotiated to improve lives have resulted in unintended consequences for people's everyday lives.
ISBN: 9780520965447Publication Date: 2018-09-18
Taking Food Public by
The field of food studies has been growing rapidly over the last thirty years and has exploded since the turn of the millennium. Scholars from an array of disciplines have trained fresh theoretical and methodological approaches onto new dimensions of the human relationship to food. This anthology capitalizes on this particular cultural moment to bring to the fore recent scholarship that focuses on innovative ways people are recasting food in public spaces to challenge hegemonic practices and meanings. Organized into five interrelated sections on food production - consumption, performance, Diasporas, and activism - articles aim to provide new perspectives on the changing meanings and uses of food in the twenty-first century.
ISBN: 9780415888554Publication Date: 2011-09-14
-
BREAKING BREAD: APPROPRIATION OR APPRECIATION? THE CASE OF MEXICAN FOOD, (Render, 9/12/14)
-
Cultural appropriation: Why is food such a sensitive subject?, (BBC News 4/13/19)
-
Fat Phobia Affects Everyone, (From the Square.org, NYU Press, 5/15/19)
- This Historian Wants You To Know The Real Story Of Southern Food (NPR, 10/1/16)
Michael Twitty wants you to know where Southern food really comes from. And he wants the enslaved African-Americans who were part of its creation to get credit. That's why Twitty goes to places like Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's grand estate in Charlottesville, Va. — to cook meals that slaves would have eaten and put their stories back into American history.
-
4 Not-So-Easy Ways to Dismantle Racism in the Food System (Yes, 4/27/17)
Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs by
Chicken--both the bird and the food--has played multiple roles in the lives of African American women from the slavery era to the present. It has provided food and a source of income for their families, shaped a distinctive culture, and helped women define and exert themselves in racist and hostile environments. Psyche A. Williams-Forson examines the complexity of black women's legacies using food as a form of cultural work. While acknowledging the negative interpretations of black culture associated with chicken imagery, Williams-Forson focuses her analysis on the ways black women have forged their own self-definitions and relationships to the "gospel bird." Exploring material ranging from personal interviews to the comedy of Chris Rock, from commercial advertisements to the art of Kara Walker, and from cookbooks to literature, Williams-Forson considers how black women arrive at degrees of self-definition and self-reliance using certain foods. She demonstrates how they defy conventional representations of blackness and exercise influence through food preparation and distribution. Understanding these complex relationships clarifies how present associations of blacks and chicken are rooted in a past that is fraught with both racism and agency. The traditions and practices of feminism, Williams-Forson argues, are inherent in the foods women prepare and serve.
ISBN: 9780807830222Publication Date: 2006-05-29
The Cooking Gene by
2018 James Beard Foundation Book of the Year | 2018 James Beard Foundation Book Award Winner inWriting | Nominee for the 2018 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction | #75 on The Root100 2018 A renowned culinary historian offers a fresh perspective on our most divisive cultural issue, race, in this illuminating memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces his ancestry--both black and white--through food, from Africa to America and slavery to freedom. Southern food is integral to the American culinary tradition, yet the question of who "owns" it is one of the most provocative touch points in our ongoing struggles over race. In this unique memoir, culinary historian Michael W. Twitty takes readers to the white-hot center of this fight, tracing the roots of his own family and the charged politics surrounding the origins of soul food, barbecue, and all Southern cuisine. From the tobacco and rice farms of colonial times to plantation kitchens and backbreaking cotton fields, Twitty tells his family story through the foods that enabled his ancestors' survival across three centuries. He sifts through stories, recipes, genetic tests, and historical documents, and travels from Civil War battlefields in Virginia to synagogues in Alabama to Black-owned organic farms in Georgia. As he takes us through his ancestral culinary history, Twitty suggests that healing may come from embracing the discomfort of the Southern past. Along the way, he reveals a truth that is more than skin deep--the power that food has to bring the kin of the enslaved and their former slaveholders to the table, where they can discover the real America together. Illustrations by Stephen Crotts
ISBN: 9780062379290Publication Date: 2017-08-01
Eating While Black by
Psyche A. Williams-Forson is one of our leading thinkers about food in America. In Eating While Black, she offers her knowledge and experience to illuminate how anti-Black racism operates in the practice and culture of eating. She shows how mass media, nutrition science, economics, and public policy drive entrenched opinions among both Black and non-Black Americans about what is healthful and right to eat. Distorted views of how and what Black people eat are pervasive, bolstering the belief that they must be corrected and regulated. What is at stake is nothing less than whether Americans can learn to embrace nonracist understandings and practices in relation to food. Sustainable culture--what keeps a community alive and thriving--is essential to Black peoples' fight for access and equity, and food is central to this fight. Starkly exposing the rampant shaming and policing around how Black people eat, Williams-Forson contemplates food's role in cultural transmission, belonging, homemaking, and survival. Black people's relationships to food have historically been connected to extreme forms of control and scarcity--as well as to stunning creativity and ingenuity. In advancing dialogue about eating and race, this book urges us to think and talk about food in new ways in order to improve American society on both personal and structural levels.
ISBN: 9781469668451Publication Date: 2022-08-16
Freedom Farmers by
In May 1967, internationally renowned activist Fannie Lou Hamer purchased forty acres of land in the Mississippi Delta, launching the Freedom Farms Cooperative (FFC). A community-based rural and economic development project, FFC would grow to over 600 acres, offering a means for local sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers to pursue community wellness, self-reliance, and political resistance. Life on the cooperative farm presented an alternative to the second wave of northern migration by African Americans--an opportunity to stay in the South, live off the land, and create a healthy community based upon building an alternative food system as a cooperative and collective effort. Freedom Farmers expands the historical narrative of the black freedom struggle to embrace the work, roles, and contributions of southern Black farmers and the organizations they formed. Whereas existing scholarship generally views agriculture as a site of oppression and exploitation of black people, this book reveals agriculture as a site of resistance and provides a historical foundation that adds meaning and context to current conversations around the resurgence of food justice/sovereignty movements in urban spaces like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, New York City, and New Orleans.
ISBN: 9781469643700Publication Date: 2018-11-06
Black Food Geographies by
In this book, Ashante M. Reese makes clear the structural forces that determine food access in urban areas, highlighting Black residents' navigation of and resistance to unequal food distribution systems. Linking these local food issues to the national problem of systemic racism, Reese examines the history of the majority-Black Deanwood neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Reese not only documents racism and residential segregation in the nation's capital but also tracks the ways transnational food corporations have shaped food availability. By connecting community members' stories to the larger issues of racism and gentrification, Reese shows there are hundreds of Deanwoods across the country. Reese's geographies of self-reliance offer an alternative to models that depict Black residents as lacking agency, demonstrating how an ethnographically grounded study can locate and amplify nuances in how Black life unfolds within the context of unequal food access.
ISBN: 9781469651491Publication Date: 2019-04-29
Every Nation Has Its Dish by
Jennifer Jensen Wallach's nuanced history of black foodways across the twentieth century challenges traditional narratives of "soul food" as a singular style of historical African American cuisine. Wallach investigates the experiences and diverse convictions of several generations of African American activists, ranging from Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois to Mary Church Terrell, Elijah Muhammad, and Dick Gregory. While differing widely in their approaches to diet and eating, they uniformly made the cultivation of "proper" food habits a significant dimension of their work and their conceptions of racial and national belonging. Tracing their quests for literal sustenance brings together the race, food, and intellectual histories of America. Directly linking black political activism to both material and philosophical practices around food, Wallach frames black identity as a bodily practice, something that conscientious eaters not only thought about but also did through rituals and performances of food preparation, consumption, and digestion. The process of choosing what and how to eat, Wallach argues, played a crucial role in the project of finding one's place as an individual, as an African American, and as a citizen.
ISBN: 9781469645216Publication Date: 2019-01-02
Diners, Dudes, and Diets by
The phrase "dude food" likely brings to mind a range of images: burgers stacked impossibly high with an assortment of toppings that were themselves once considered a meal; crazed sports fans demolishing plates of radioactively hot wings; barbecued or bacon-wrapped . . . anything. But there is much more to the phenomenon of dude food than what's on the plate. Emily J. H. Contois's provocative book begins with the dude himself--a man who retains a degree of masculine privilege but doesn't meet traditional standards of economic and social success or manly self-control. In the Great Recession's aftermath, dude masculinity collided with food producers and marketers desperate to find new customers. The result was a wave of new diet sodas and yogurts marketed with dude-friendly stereotypes, a transformation of food media, and weight loss programs just for guys. In a work brimming with fresh insights about contemporary American food media and culture, Contois shows how the gendered world of food production and consumption has influenced the way we eat and how food itself is central to the contest over our identities.
ISBN: 9781469660738Publication Date: 2020-11-16
Taking the Heat by
A number of recent books, magazines, and television programs have emerged that promise to take viewers inside the exciting world of professional chefs. While media suggest that the occupation is undergoing a transformation, one thing remains clear: being a chef is a decidedly male-dominated job. Over the past six years, the prestigious James Beard Foundation has presented 84 awards for excellence as a chef, but only 19 were given to women. Likewise, Food and Wine magazine has recognized the talent of 110 chefs on its annual "Best New Chef" list since 2000, and to date, only 16 women have been included. How is it that women--the gender most associated with cooking--have lagged behind men in this occupation? Taking the Heat examines how the world of professional chefs is gendered, what conditions have led to this gender segregation, and how women chefs feel about their work in relation to men. Tracing the historical evolution of the profession and analyzing over two thousand examples of chef profiles and restaurant reviews, as well as in-depth interviews with thirty-three women chefs, Deborah A. Harris and Patti Giuffre reveal a great irony between the present realities of the culinary profession and the traditional, cultural associations of cooking and gender. Since occupations filled with women are often culturally and economically devalued, male members exclude women to enhance the job's legitimacy. For women chefs, these professional obstacles and other challenges, such as how to balance work and family, ultimately push some of the women out of the career. Although female chefs may be outsiders in many professional kitchens, the participants in Taking the Heat recount advantages that women chefs offer their workplaces and strengths that Harris and Giuffre argue can help offer women chefs--and women in other male-dominated occupations--opportunities for greater representation within their fields. Click here to access the Taking the Heat teaching guide (https://d3tto5i5w9ogdd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/02142601/Taking-the-Heat-Questions-for-Instructors.docx).
ISBN: 9780813571270Publication Date: 2015-05-20
Cheffes de Cuisine by
Though women enter France's culinary professions at higher rates than ever, men still receive the lion's share of the major awards and Michelin stars. Rachel E. Black looks at the experiences of women in Lyon to examine issues of gender inequality in France's culinary industry. Known for its female-led kitchens, Lyon provides a unique setting for understanding the gender divide, as Lyonnais women have played a major role in maintaining the city's culinary heritage and its status as a center for innovation. Voices from history combine with present-day interviews and participant observation to reveal the strategies women use to navigate male-dominated workplaces or, in many cases, avoid men in kitchens altogether. Black also charts how constraints imposed by French culture minimize the impact of #MeToo and other reform-minded movements. Evocative and original, Cheffes de Cuisine celebrates the successes of women inside the professional French kitchen and reveals the obstacles women face in the culinary industry and other male-dominated professions.
ISBN: 9780252052934Publication Date: 2021-11-02
Tangled Routes by
Where does our food come from? Whose hands have planted, cultivated, picked, packed, processed, transported, scanned, sold, sliced, and cooked it? What production practices have transformed it from seed to fruit, from fresh to processed form? Who decides what is grown and how? What are the effects of those decisions on our health and the health of the planet? Tangled Routes tackles these fascinating questions and demystifies globalization by tracing the long journey of a corporate tomato from a Mexican field to a Canadian fast-food restaurant. Through an interdisciplinary lens, Deborah Barndt examines the dynamic relationships between production and consumption, work and technology, biodiversity and cultural diversity, and health and environment. A globalization-from-above perspective is reflected in the corporate agendas of a Mexican agribusiness, the U.S.-based McDonald's chain, and Canadian-based Loblaws supermarkets. The women workers on the front line of these businesses offer a humanized globalization-from-below perspective, while yet another "globalization" is revealed through examples of resistance and local alternatives. This revised and updated edition highlights developments since the turn of the millennium, in particular the deepening economic integration of the NAFTA countries as well as the growing questioning of NAFTA's consequences and the crafting of alternatives built on foundations of sustainability and justice.
ISBN: 9780742555563Publication Date: 2007-12-07
- Food Is Queer
The Bon Appétit Staff & Contributors. “Queer Food Is Everywhere.” Bon Appétit, Conde Nast, 22 June 2022, https://www.bonappetit.com/story/food-is-queer.
- I'm a Queer Brown Immigrant Chef. I Don't Have the Luxury of Staying Silent.
Mistry, Preeti. “I’m a Queer Brown Immigrant Chef. I Don’t Have the Luxury of Staying Silent.” Time.Com, Feb. 2019, p. N.PAG. EBSCOhost, https://search-ebscohost-com.jwupvdz.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mth&AN=134574368&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
- Queer Tastes: An Exploration of Food and Sexuality in Southern Lesbian Literature
Lawrence, J. K. (2014). Queer Tastes: An Exploration of Food and Sexuality in Southern Lesbian Literature. Graduate Theses and Dissertations Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/1021
- Trans Chefs Are Reshaping Restaurant Culture.
McElroy, Isle. “Trans Chefs Are Reshaping Restaurant Culture.” Bon Appétit, Conde Nast, 22 June 2022, https://www.bonappetit.com/story/trans-chefs-changing-restaurant-culture?_ga=2.167784289.1964617200.1663691890-1964825295.1663691890.
Killer Fat: Media, Medicine, and Morals in the American Obesity Epidemic by
"Killer Fat" examines how and why obesity emerged as a major public health concern and national obsession in recent years. Using primary sources and in-depth interviews, Boero enters the world of bariatric surgeries, Weight Watchers, and Overeaters Anonymous to show how common expectations of what bodies are supposed to look like help to determine what sorts of interventions and policies are considered urgent in containing this new kind of disease.
ISBN: 9781283687812Publication Date: 2012-01-01
What's Wrong with Fat? by
The United States, we are told, is facing an obesity epidemic, a "battle of the bulge" that requires drastic and immediate action. Some have predicted that, due to increasing rates of overweight and obesity, this generation will be the first to die at a younger age than their parents. Obesityhas been blamed for increasing healthcare expenditure, rising costs of airplane travel, and even global warming. How and why has obesity exploded onto the public health agenda? How does this perspective of obesity as a crisis - as well as how we assign blame and responsibility for obesity - affecthow we feel about our bodies? And how does it inform how medical professionals and the general public treat visibly fat people?Drawing on interviews, statistical analyses, and experimental studies, Abigail Saguy examines the implications of understanding fatness as a medical health risk, disease, and epidemic, and how we've come to understand the issue in these terms. Saguy argues that our current fears build upon acentury-old distaste for fat as a marker of moral failing and low social status. Economic, professional, and political incentives, she demonstrates, have also contributed to the social construction of obesity as a medical problem and as a public health crisis. She also shows how scientific debatesover the relationship between body size and health risk take place within a larger, though often invisible, debate over whether we should understand - or frame - fatness as obesity at all.From obesity to fat acceptance, Saguy examines the various frames in which the idea of fat is viewed - and most importantly acted upon - today. Controversially, she argues that public discussions of the obesity crisis are actually creating the phenomenon that they claim to be dispassionatelyexploring. From the categories we use to discuss overweight and obesity, to the way we frame the crisis, we are literally making ourselves fat. Finally, What's Wrong with Fat? reveals the collateral damage - including the intensification of negative body image and justification of weight-baseddiscrimination - of the war on fat.
ISBN: 9780199857081Publication Date: 2013-01-02
Body Love by
Celebrity favorite health and wellness consultant Kelly LeVeque shares her secrets for losing weight, attuning ourselves to our bodies' needs, and freeing ourselves from food drama in this essential wellness guide, which includes 88 delectable recipes! In this inspirational yet practical book, the nutritional consultant and holistic healthcare expert who has helped celebrities such as Jessica Alba, Molly Sims, Chelsea Handler, and Emmy Rossum improve their health and achieve their goals shows you how to get beyond the food drama of cyclical fad diets and feel and look great by eating well. Kelly's Food Freedom program helps you set yourself up for success, eliminating cravings, mood swings, and other symptoms caused by food drama. Start your day with her Fab Four Smoothies, including a Strawberry Shortcake Smoothie and a Mango Kale Madness Smoothie, which pack protein, fat, fiber, and carbs to balance your blood sugar and keep you full and happy. After breakfast, you'll thrive with her Fab Four recipes, including Turkey-Stuffed Delicata Squash, Spicy Salmon Nori Burritos, and Anti-Inflammatory Detox Salad, which include the Fab Four food groups--protein, fat, fiber, and greens--that play a role in day-long satiety. Kelly also teaches you how to elongate your blood sugar curve to stay full and happy, and make yourself insulin aware. Kelly has studied the science behind familiar diets to understand how they trigger the body to lose pounds--and why they aren't sustainable. Instead, she offers a better choice: her four-step Food Freedom program that helps you find your wellness balance between eating enough and deciding how you feel. Once you find your balance, you will lose weight, lose fat, increase lean muscle mass, and drop at least one size. You'll also enjoy thicker, shinier hair; clear, glowing skin; a remarkable improvement in your overall appearance; reduced joint pain and other inflammations; increased energy; and better sleep. Filled with tips and resources on supplements and cleansing, dozens of delicious, healthy recipes and advice on how to adjust your eating when traveling and on vacation, Body Love is your one-stop resource to living clean and happy!
ISBN: 9780062569141Publication Date: 2017-06-27
