Food as Communication / Communication as Food

Janet M. Cramer, Ph.D., is a communication scholar specializing in media studies, sociology of media, food communication, history, gender studies, and intersectional studies. Her research publications include an examination of ideologies of womanhood in the 19^th century press, the construction of race and class in various forms of media, the cultural meanings of food, and a history of media focusing on the cultural and intellectual traditions that guided mass media development in the United States, titled Media/History/Society: A Cultural History of U.S. Media (2009).

Carlnita P. Greene, Ph.D., is the Dean of Behavioral, Social Sciences & Global Learning at Bunker Hill Community College. She is the author of Gourmands & Gluttons: The Rhetoric of Food Excess (2015) and editor of Foodscapes: Food, Space, and Place in a Global Society (2019). She has previously published on subjects as diverse as identity and social style and the rhetoric of popular culture.

Lynn M. Walters, Ph.D., Licensed Nutritionist (NM), is the founder of Cooking with Kids, Inc., an award-winning non-profit that educates and empowers children and families to make healthy food choices through hands-on learning with fresh, affordable foods: cookingwithkids.org. Her interests focus on the behavioral effects of experiential learning with food; family, peer, and environmental influences on cooking and food choice; and the connections between gardening and health.

From high-tech kitchen gadgets and magazines to the Food Network, the last few decades have seen a huge rise in food-focused consumption, media, and culture. The discourses surrounding food range from media coverage of school lunchrooms and hunger issues, to news stories about urban gardening or buying organic products at the local farmers market. Food is no longer viewed merely as a means of survival. International and comprehensive in approach, this volume is the first book-length study of food from a communication perspective. Scholars examine and explore this emerging field to provide definitive and foundational examples of how food operates as a system of communication, and how communication theory and practices can be understood by considering food in this way. In doing so, the book serves to inspire future dialogues on the subject due to its vast array of ideas about food and its relationship to our communication practices.

Contents: Carlnita P. Greene/Janet M. Cramer: Beyond mere sustenance: Food as communication/Communication as food - Laura A. Lindenfeld: Feasts for our eyes: Viewing films on food through new lenses - Deborah Morrison Thomson: Play with your food: The performativity of online breakfast cereal marketing - Defne Karaosmanoglu: Remembering past(s): The construction of cosmopolitan Istanbul through nostalgic flavors - Adele Wessell/Andrew Jones: Faith-based homespace: Decoding good taste in a monastery - Carlnita P. Greene: Competing identities at the table: Slow food, consumption, and the performance of social style - Kristen Lucas/Patrice M. Buzzanell: It's the cheese: Collective memory of hard times during deindustrialization - Kevin-Khristián Cosgriff-Hernández/Amanda R. Martinez/Barbara F. Sharf/Joseph R. Sharkey: «We still had to have tortillas»: Negotiating health, culture, and change in the Mexican American diet - Kathleen M. German: Memory, identity, and resistance: Recipes from the women of Theresienstadt - Fabio Parasecoli: Looking at men's tables: Food and masculinities in blockbuster movies - John R. Thompson: Dinner time discourse: Convenience foods and industrial society - Vincent (Tzu-Wen) Cheng: «A four-legged duck?»: Chinese restaurant culture in the United States from a crosscultural/inter-cultural communication perspective - Christie McCullen: The white farm imaginary: How one farmers market refetishizes the production of food and limits food politics - Jessica Mudry: Quantifying the American Eater: USDA nutrition guidance and a language of numbers - Barry Brummett: Hunting, gardening, and the original work of art: A homological analysis - Michael S. Bruner/Jason D. Meek: A critical crisis rhetoric of seafood - Anne Marie Todd: Eating the view: Environmental aesthetics, national identity, and food activism - Janet M. Cramer: Discourses of consumption and sustainability on the Food Network - Matthew Kaplan/Lynn James/Frances Alloway/Nancy Ellen Kiernan: Youth empowerment in family conversations and decision-making about food - Marianne LeGreco: «Mama thinks I'm feeding you»: Using food rules to restructure school meal programs - Tara J. Schuwerk: Food bank culture: Food and nutrition communication in a hunger-relief organization - Ross Singer: The corporate colonization of communication about global hunger: Development, biotechnology, and discursive closure in the Monsanto pledge - Lynn M. Walters: High school students' perceptions of environmental and communicative influences on eating behavior.