Food and Everyday Life

Thomas M. Conroy is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Lehman College¿City University of New York.

Food and Everyday Life provides a qualitative, interpretive, and interdisciplinary examination of food and food practices and their meanings in the modern world. Edited by Thomas M. Conroy, the book offers a number of complementary approaches and topics around the parameters of the "ordinary, everyday" perspective on food. These studies highlight aspects of food production, distribution, and consumption, as well as the discourse on food. Chapters discuss examples ranging from the cultural meanings of food as represented on television, to the practices of food budgeting, to the cultural politics of such practices as sustainable brewing and developing new forms of urban agriculture. A number of the studies focus on the relationships between food, eating practices, and the body. Each chapter examines a particular (and in many instances, highly unique) food practice, and each includes some key details of that practice. Taken together, the chapters show us how the everyday practices of food are both familiar and, yet at the same time, ripe for further discovery.

PrefaceIntroductionPart 1: Food Meanings and RepresentationsChapter 1: Gagging on the Other: Television's Gross Food ChallengeChapter 2: From Bento to Blog: The Digital Culture of an Everyday Japanese MealChapter 3: Museums, Consumption and the Everyday: Encountering the Colonial "Other" through FoodChapter 4: From Smack to Cuisine: The Spatialization of Taiwanese FoodsChapter 5: Drinking Local: Sustainable Brewing, Alternative Food Networks, and the Politics of ValuationPart 2: Food Practice Case StudiesChapter 6: Both Luxurious and Ordinary: Everyday Consumption and the Marketing of Indonesian Food Products in AmericaChapter 7: Cultivating Localization through Commodity De-Fetishism: Contours of Authenticity and the Pursuit of Transparency in the Local Organic Agrarian Food MarketChapter 8: Embodied Connections: A New Wave of Urban AgricultureChapter 9: The Dilemma of Dinner: The Practice of Home Cooking in Everyday LifePart 3: Food Consumption Practices and The BodyChapter 10: The Phenomenology of Food Consumption: A Developmental ViewChapter 11: Healthy Eating on a Budget: Negotiating Tensions Between Two DiscoursesChapter 12: Fat Eats: A Phenomenology of Decadence, Food, and HealthIndexAbout the Contributors