Food preparation, consumption, and exchange are eminently social practices, and experiencing another cuisine often provides our first encounter with a different culture. This volume presents fascinating essays about cooking, eating, and sharing food, by anthropologists working in many parts of the world, exploring what they learned by eating with others.
These are accounts of specific experiences - of cooking in Mombasa, shopping for organic produce in Vienna, eating vegetarian in Vietnam, raising and selling chickens in Hong Kong, and of refugees subsisting on food aid. With a special focus on the experience and challenge of ethnographic fieldwork, the essays cover a wide range of topics in food studies and anthropology, including food safety and food security, cultural diversity and globalization, colonial histories and contemporary identities, and changing ecological, social, and political relations across cultures.
Food: Ethnographic Encounters offers readers a broad view of the vibrancy of local and global food cultures, and provides an accessible introduction to both food studies and contemporary ethnography.
Preface
John Borneman
Introduction
Leo Coleman
1. Food and Morality in Yemen
Anne Meneley, Trent University, Canada
2. It All Started with the Bhajias
Nina Berman, The Ohio State University, USA
3. The Enchantments of Food in the Lower Amazon, Brazil
Mark Harris, University of St Andrews, UK
4. Live Poultry Markets and Avian Flu in Hong Kong
Frédéric Keck, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France
5. Revisiting Lao Food: Pain and Commensality
Penny Van Esterik, York University, Canada
6. In Search of the Elusive Heirloom Tomato: Farms and Farmers' Markets, Fields and Fieldwork
Jennifer A. Jordan, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA
7. Keeping out of the Kitchen: Cooking and Power in a Moroccan Household
Claire Nicholas, Princeton University, USA
8. "Do You Know How to Eat . . .?" Edible Expertise in Ho Chi Minh City
Nina Hien, New York University, USA
9. Learning to Exchange Words and Food in the Marquesas
Kathleen C. Riley, Queens College, City University of New York, USA
10. Eating Vegetarian in Vietnam
Christophe Robert, City University of Hong Kong, China
11. The Food of Sorrow: Humanitarian Aid to Displaced People
Elizabeth Dunn, University of Colorado, USA
Guide for Further Reading
Endmatter
