Anthropocene Ecologies of Food

Simon C. Estok is a full professor and Senior Research Fellow at Sungkyunkwan University (South Korea's first and oldest university) and a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. Estok teaches literary theory, ecocriticism, and Shakespearean literature.

S. Susan Deborah, an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at MES College of Arts and Commerce, Goa, West India, is the co-editor of Ecodocumentaries: Critical Essays (2016), Ecocultural Ethics: Critical Essays (2017), and Culture and Media: Ecocritical Explorations (2014).

Rayson K. Alex, an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, is the secretary of tiNai and the founder and co-director of tiNai Ecofilm Festival.

Anthropocene Ecologies of Food provides a detailed exploration of cross-cultural aspects of food production, culinary practices, and their ecological underpinning in culture. The authors draw connections between humans and the entire process of global food production, focusing on the broad implications these processes have within the geographical and cultural context of India. Each chapter analyzes and critiques existing agricultural/food practices, and representations of aspects of food through various media (such as film, literature, and new media) as they relate to global issues generally and Indian contexts specifically, correcting the omission of analyses focused on the Global South in virtually all of the work that has been done on "Anthropocene ecologies of food." This unique volume employs an ecocritical framework that connects food with the land, in physical and virtual communities, and the book as a whole interrogates the meanings and implications of the Anthropocene itself.

Anthropocene Ecologies of Food provides a detailed exploration of cross-cultural aspects of food production, culinary practices, and their ecological underpinning in culture.

Introduction: Food Systems and Ecological Well-Being - S. Susan Deborah

1. Rice and the Anthropocene in the Southern Indian Peninsula - Nirmal Selvamony
2. The Taste of Place: Food, Ecology, and Culture in Kodagu - Subarna De
3. This Compost! India and the History of Global Organic Farming - Mart A. Stewart

Part II: Intercultural Food Practices

4. Environmental Food Documentaries: From Fast Food Nation to a Popular Selection of Top 20 YouTube Videos - Pat Brereton

5. Bacalhau in England and Goa: A Case Study of Economy, Ecology, and the Assignation of Value in the Global South, circa 1472-2019 - William Spates
6. The Future of Food: Trajectories in Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl - Young-hyun Lee
7. Metaphors and Metonymies of Food in Four Asian Texts - Chitra Sankaran

Part C: Crises, Disintegration, Food

8. Agrarian Distress and Food Sovereignty in the Anthropocene: A Reading of Namita Waikar's The Long March - P. Rajitha Venugopal
9. Dalit Food, Ecology, and Resistance - Samuel Moses Srinivas Kuntam

Afterword: Toward Shifts in Global Food Systems - Simon C. Estok