Anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa became major health concerns in the 1970s and 1980s, attracting particular attention from second-wave feminists because the conditions were perceived as women’s illnesses. Because these illnesses were thought to exclusively strike prosperous and educated women of the middle class, critics hypothesized that there was something particular to middle-class identity that made these girls and women distinctly vulnerable. Industrial capitalism was newly framed as a cause for the development of eating disorders. Historians traced the origins of anorexia to the Victorian era—the disease first appeared in the medical record in the 1870s—seeing it as a reaction to the pressures and struggles women faced in the newly ascendant bourgeoisie. Although anorexia was itself an obscure diagnosis in the 19th century, late-20th-century literary critics and historians traced anorexic aesthetics and ideals in art and culture of the time, and industrial capitalism was thought to delineate a particular, and pathological, relationship between consumption and bourgeois women. Anorexia became a way to conceptualize the harms of capitalism on middle-class women and to articulate their lives as simultaneously prosperous and deeply oppressive, if not incapacitating.
The idea that early industrial capitalism primed middle-class women for eating disorders was revised by contemporary cultural critics who were struggling to understand why such unprecedented numbers of girls and young women were developing and being diagnosed with eating disorders during the 1970s and 1980s. This unprecedented and inexplicable epidemic implied that postwar consumer growth had specifically gendered harms. Thus, second-wave feminists, including historian Joan Brumberg, psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, and philosopher Susan Bordo, analyzed anorexia and bulimia as a way to articulate the dangers posed by postwar consumer capitalism for girls and women. For them, consumer capitalism was perceived as a primary driver of anorexia and bulimia. The analysis hinged upon the paradoxical meaning of consumption in postwar capitalism, which was the cause of and symbolized by the deadly self-denial of the anorexic and the irrational gorging and purging of the bulimic. Eating disorders thus expressed the gendered and destructive impacts of late-modern capitalism on the female body, combining the demand for unbridled consumption and individual empowerment with expectations of female self-denial and physical smallness. These new ways of thinking about the relationship between economic systems and the health and appearance of individual bodies, particularly though not exclusively female bodies, had profound consequences that shape 21st-century conversations around obesity and the neoliberal market. These attempts to contextualize and historicize anorexia and bulimia by exploring their relationship to consumer capitalism not only made material the link between economic systems and women’s lives and bodies; they also suggested that affluence itself could be a source of sickness.
Article
Anorexia, Bulimia, and the Embodiment of Capitalist Consumer Culture
Alice Weinreb
Article
Bread as a Social Indicator in Egypt
Nefissa Naguib
Bread plays a crucial role in Egypt, profoundly impacting identity, family, and public interactions. Made from wheat, bread is not only a vital component of the national diet but also a focal point of Egypt’s social policy. Ensuring its affordability remains a central aim of the government. Despite these efforts, the availability and affordability of bread have continued to be points of debate and tension within Egyptian society. More than just a material good, bread in Egypt functions as a significant social indicator that affects and establishes relationships between people. It signals various states such as prosperity, distress, anxiety, and social and political mobilization. Bread is a remarkable commodity that provides nourishment while also serving as a potent symbol, encompassing spiritual, cultural, social, political, and economic dimensions.
Throughout Egypt’s political history, bread has emerged as a potent symbol in political discourse. Bread-related protests and movements have often signaled dissatisfaction with food policies and government actions. Shortages or price fluctuations in bread have frequently triggered public outcry and served as catalysts for social and political change. The political history of bread in Egypt encapsulates themes of division and cruelty as much as generosity and fulfillment. This was starkly evident during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, when bread became a powerful symbol of protest. Women held up pieces of bread, and men made helmets from it, emphasizing the slogan, “Bread, Dignity, and Social Justice.” Though bread may appear mundane, it is far from trivial. It represents power structures, human agency, and patterns of social relations. Bread is a gift that satisfies hunger, provides pleasure, evokes memory, and creates attachments. It acts as a link between the powerful and the powerless and between abundance and scarcity on family dining tables across Egypt. Bread’s presence at the core of daily life, the desperate measures families take to secure it, and its role in moments of crisis all underscore its significance.
Article
Calorie Counting
Nina Mackert
[This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. Please check back later for the full article.]
In the 21st century, calorie counts are ubiquitous in weight-loss advice, but historically they are a fairly recent phenomenon. In the late 19th century, a transatlantic coalition of researchers and reformers began to understand food as energy for human motors that could help to optimize human and social productivity, even on a global scale.
It was not until the early 20th century that calorie counting was introduced into weight-loss diets. This contributed to the emergence of fat shaming by suggesting that an individual’s excess body weight was the direct and causal result of eating more than their caloric needs, placing the responsibility for their body and health in the hands of that individual. Recent diagnoses of “the death of the calorie” confirm that the history of the calorie is a political one, in that they perpetuate the calorie’s legacy of framing weight loss as a capability of self-governing citizens.
Article
Candy and Sweets
Susan Benjamin
[This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. Please check back later for the full article.]
Everyone knows candy. In every culture, every land, just about every person indulges in candy at some point—usually innumerable points—in their lives. The modern impression of candy is both gleeful and condescending; candy is delicious, but is it really food? People enjoy candies, but are they healthy? And its relevance in the historical food timeline? What relevance?
What is known is that candy, whether hard candies, chocolates, or gummies, is unique. While other foods promise nutritional value, the essential purpose of candy is to make consumers happy, to accentuate experiences of fun. Just think of cotton candy at carnivals: happy shades of blue, reds, and yellow strands melting in our mouths.
Candy is also uniquely dynamic: historically, rarified creams and sugar plums were available to the wealthy few while cheap hard candies were sold at saloons to mask the smell of alcohol on the breath. Industrial candy of the late 1800s gave working-class children an opportunity to become consumers, and a promise that they, too, could be part of the middle class. Candy was affordable, fun, and made just for them.
Yet beneath the tip of this food-based iceberg, candy has a complex history. Many candies are both ritualistic and symbolic, unbeknownst to those who enjoy them today. Consider sugar-coated almonds. Romans threw at weddings as a fertility charm, a symbol in keeping with the almond tree’s flowering cycle as one of the first trees to flower in spring. In 2024, it is still common to serve Jordan almonds at weddings.
Hard candies, toffees, and mints found a place in the candy bowls of 20th-century grandmothers in the United States, who had experienced sugar shortages during economic downturns and the two world wars. When candy, an embodiment of sugar, returned, it was a symbol of affluence and a sign that everything was alright again.
Conversely, in the mid-1800s through the early 1900s, candy also became a symbol of the hazards of industrial foods. As they were often made with adulterants whose safety and effect on health had never been checked, such claims certainly had validity. Some, on the other hand, were unlikely: candy consumption was said to incite undesirable behavior ranging from setting fires to murder.
Most surprising is the fact that candies were also born of necessity, as they were used for health and healing. Chewing gum, for example, originated with tree resins, which were chewed to clean the teeth and heal dental issues. The fun and fruity latex-based gums that followed are still used for health-related issues, whether to ease dry mouth or cleanse the breath. Even sugar, in its candy form as rock candy or candy drops, has long been used to ease sore throats.
The trajectory of candy history takes us to a salient point: the confluence of people, places, and customs. Candy bars, for example, contain chocolate (from Mesoamerica), cane sugar (Asia), peanuts (South America), nougat (Europe), and various dried fruits.
As people age and their sense of taste recedes, they crave sweetness. Candy offers both the sweet flavor their bodies demand and a visceral reminder of candy shared with others, many of whom may be dear and have long since passed. On another front, scientists recently discovered that strands of cotton candy mimic human capillaries. So close is the connection, researchers are using cotton candy machines in their efforts to develop artificial organs which may well enable people to live longer than they could have dreamed.
Article
The Ethics of Veganism and Plant-Based Diets
Carlo Alvaro
Humans have been consuming meat and other animal products for millennia. Although people have been following vegetarian diets for just as long, for the past fifty years or so, many academic philosophers, as well as laypeople, have been arguing against the consumption of animal products and arguing for vegetarian or vegan diets. There are distinct differences between veganism, vegetarianism, and plant-based diets. There are also various ethical views in twenty-first century discussions concerning diets, as well as the ethical, environmental, and social implications of veganism and plant-based diets. As of the 2020s, lab-grown meat and the meaning and future of veganism has gained attention in the cultural consciousness.
Article
The Ethiopian and Yemeni Roots of Coffee
Michel Tuchscherer
The beginnings of the history of coffee can be found in two neighboring countries separated only by the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Coffee’s history starts before its consumption in Europe during the middle of the 17th century and before the development of its cultivation in the European tropical colonies during the 18th century. Yet this history is not well known in the early 21st century and often is pervaded by myths, the best known being the myth concerning the goat-herder Kaldi. There are objective reasons for this situation. In Ethiopia, the origins of coffee are found solely in the southern part of the country. Written sources about coffee that predate the 18th century are extremely rare, and so far very few archaeological excavations have provided data about coffee consumption. In Yemen, the archives that could cast light on the relevant period, from the end of the 15th century to the start of the 19th century, are mainly in the hands of families who are scattered across the country. Because of early-21st-century conflicts in the region, access to these archives is completely out of the question.
Nevertheless, research published since the 1990s in the areas of history and anthropology, alongside genetic analyses of the species Coffea arabica, opens the way to a new view of the pioneering role of southern Ethiopia and Yemen in the dissemination of the coffee consumption, the domestication of the coffee plant, and the production of coffee beans since at least the 13th century and up to the 18th century.
Article
Family Farm Myths and the Effacement of Labor
Adam Calo
The debate on the role of family farmers in global food security often overlooks deep mythologies that shape our understanding of the food system and constrain our policy imagination. Two dominant myths present family farmers as either noble stewards of the land or as struggling, inefficient peasants. Both myths obscure the critical role of labor in agriculture. Labor relations in farming, whether involving unpaid family members, local knowledge-intensive practices, hired exploited workers, or mechanization, are the forces that shape the social-ecological balance of the food system. The myth of the family farm forces attention on who manages the land rather than the social-ecological relations that ultimately determine the fate of the food system. While objective measurements of family farm contributions are valuable, they cannot resolve the underlying power of myths. Instead, food studies in this area should focus on constructing new myths that highlight the labor and laborers in the food system, fostering a narrative that supports sustainable and equitable agricultural practices.
Article
Fat
Azita Chellappoo
[This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Food Studies. Please check back later for the full article.]
Research into the social and cultural dimensions of body size has been rapidly growing, including within the interdisciplinary field of fat studies. Fat studies scholars contest and critique mainstream ideas about body size or weight, including the view that “obesity” is fundamentally pathological or inherently unhealthy, or that individuals can control their body size. Researchers have also challenged negative stereotypes and highlighted the harms of moralizing and stigmatizing discourses about larger bodies. Research within this area often draws upon ideas produced within fat liberation activist movements, including rejecting the term “obesity” as overly medicalizing and pathologizing, and instead reclaiming “fat” and “fatness” as neutral descriptors.
Research has identified and characterized the pervasiveness of anti-fatness (weight stigma, or anti-fat discrimination) within and across societies. Anti-fatness has interpersonal and structural dimensions, both of which can have far-reaching effects on fat people’s lives, including effects on health outcomes. Scholars have traced the historical emergence of anti-fatness, the connection between anti-fatness and racial hierarchy, and the ways in which anti-fatness contributes to the moralization of food and the prevalence of dieting practices. Additionally, policies and clinical guidelines developed to address the “obesity epidemic,” such as calorie labeling and the use of body mass index (BMI), have been a target of critical examination. Researchers have suggested that these interventions can function as potentially harmful practices of control and surveillance that reinforce anti-fat attitudes and structures. Similarly, frameworks and understandings of food environments, food justice, and health have been evaluated in terms of the ways in which these discourses can continue to problematize fat bodies and contribute to discrimination or marginalization.
There has been increasing recognition of the harms of anti-fatness in fields such as public health, which has led to attempts to move away from stigmatizing language and interventions, and to reject placing responsibility on individuals. However, these attempts have been criticized for continuing to medicalize and pathologize fatness, and therefore continuing to perpetuate harm. As the language and policies around “obesity” or fatness shift, in part driven by the introduction of novel weight-loss interventions such as Ozempic, research into social attitudes toward fatness and the experiences of people with larger bodies continues to evolve.
Article
Fat Stigma in the United States
Amy Erdman Farrell
Fat stigma has deep roots in US and Western cultures, dating back centuries. Whatever leniency or even valorization given to a fat body for its sign of wealth or healthy fecundity was largely replaced by a colonial abhorrence of fatness linked to processes of racialization, white supremacy, and the legitimization of slavery. Fatness became a powerful signifier of an “uncivilized” body, one unfit for modern life. These ideas continue to resonate in the early 21st century, fueling a $90 billion diet industry, causing discrimination in every institution and organization, and creating untold harm in the lives of fat individuals and communities. Significantly, however, these ideas are not uniform. Not only are there varied perceptions of fatness (the idealization of a fat baby’s body, the enjoyment of fatty foods, the pleasure in the curves and flesh of a lover), there is also an organized and decades-old fat activist and fat studies movement that challenges fat stigma on every layer.
Article
Food and Ethnicity
Krishnendu Ray
Ethnic food is a slippery concept, used in various anglophone publications by the 1960s, peaking in the 1980s, and no longer used in major US metropolitan newspapers by the 2020s. It came into play in other parts of the world about a generation later and continues to be used unevenly. It is typically used to identify cuisines that are not considered mainstream or archetypical of a region or a nation. Inferiority (or lack of class), cheapness, spiciness, and authenticity are the typical tropes used to judge such cuisines. It has always had the stench of primitivism and Orientalism attached to it and is increasingly considered outdated, such as terms like “Negro” or “Oriental.” The term was historically used to describe a cuisine that is different horizontally, such as Thai, Indian, or Chinese, but it also carried a hierarchical connotation, where French or Nordic cuisines were hardly ever named as ethnic anywhere in the world. New York City offers a case study in examining the history and hierarchy between food and ethnicity.
Article
Food and Nationalism in India
Benjamin Siegel
The imbrication of food and nationalism in India and South Asia was an implicit concern in early anthropological literature on primarily Hindu foodways. In time, this theme became more explicit in historiographic work on colonial encounters and culinary resistance and in political economy of domesticity. It was also increasingly overt in and the emergence of food and hunger as a locus for nationalist claim making. The Bengal famine, coming at the crux of the freedom struggle in India, helped move these claims to more central positions in postcolonial Indian politics. An emerging body of work has seen culinary identity as central to both diasporic politics and questions of marginalization in Indian political life.
Article
Food and Philosophy
Andrea Borghini
The philosophy of food is an emerging field of contemporary philosophical scholarship, which distinguishes itself for its highly inter- and cross-disciplinary orientation as well as for the contamination of different schools and traditions of philosophy. Initially preoccupied with core issues concerning food ethics (e.g., vegetarianism and the ethics of agriculture) and food aesthetics (e.g., the nature of gustatory experience as well as its aesthetic value), the philosophy of food has since expanded to encompass a wide range of debates linked to food production, consumption, and representation. The list of topics includes, among others and in no particular order: food systems vis-à-vis climate change and environmental ethics; the ethics of dieting and obesity; food and cultural appropriation; questions concerning the identity of specific food items (e.g., natural foods, recipes, geographical indications); the aesthetic worth of specific beverages (among the most studied, wine, coffee, beer, whiskey); broad conceptions of food justice as found in local food movements, feminist approaches to the study of food, and social gastronomy. This list testifies not only to the broad spectrum of questions that philosophers have taken up, but also to the numerous methodologies that they have employed to address them.
Article
Food in Anglophone Children’s Literature
Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard
Food is an important touchstone for both children’s literature authors and scholars, as it functions as a key material object and cultural construct within an aesthetic context in texts written for children. A full understanding of the significance of food and children’s literature draws from the interdisciplinary field of food studies, with its bases in anthropology, sociology, history, and literary studies. Food studies provides an approach to show how pervasive food is in children’s literature and how it operates as a complex cultural, political, and aesthetic signifier in myriad ways. The major approaches and uses of food in texts aimed at children divide into eight groups: eating or being eaten; the empowerment and agency of the individual; socialization, manners, and rebellion within family and community; taste; food preparation; food production, famines, and feasts; place and culture; and identity.
While food is fundamental to all human life, it occupies a particularly important place for the young. Children require food to fuel their survival and growth; adults use it daily as a socialization tool to teach children manners and social values, so that, in essence, they become civilized beings within the context of their culture. Such socialization creates emotional responses within children: They learn to develop individual tastes which they must balance with familial and cultural group identity, in the process of which they may experience anxiety or comfort. Thus, food consumption is foundational to a child’s developing sense of self. Children’s and young adult literature explores the growing identities of its protagonists; thus, the pervasiveness and complexity of food representations within it is equally unsurprising. The ways that food is used by writers of children’s literature within their texts mirror real world cultural manifestations of food in children’s lives, both past and present, locally and globally. Ultimately, children’s literature is a microcosm of how food functions generally as a multivalent cultural signifier. Its presence and treatment within texts reveal existential anxieties; individuation through developing skills, abilities, and tastes; socialization into group mores and manners as well as resistance to them; and connections between individual experiences and location: all factors that go into shaping the identity of individuals, families, and communities.
Article
Food in the Medieval Islamic World (9th–15th Centuries)
Daniel Newman
The medieval Islamic world boasts a rich tapestry of culinary traditions reflecting the diverse cultures that make up the region. This period saw the introduction of significant changes in dietary practices, food culture, and foodways.
As the Islamic Empire expanded, it became a trading hub, introducing spices and culinary practices from across the known world. During the Abbasid caliphate, culinary literature emerged, showcasing a sophisticated cuisine that is arguably the richest of the Middle Ages. Surviving works originated in an area spanning from Muslim Spain (al-Andalus) to the Near East (Mashriq) and reveal the importance attached to the culinary arts and gastronomy in elite circles. The cuisine was inextricably linked with medicine, with an emphasis on the health benefits of ingredients and dishes.
Culinary texts also reveal the sophisticated kitchen equipment and tableware available and the attention paid to presentation. There was a structured approach to dining that started with appetizers and progressed to more substantial dishes, often involving complex flavors and cooking techniques. Religious teachings also influenced dietary practices, with prohibitions on certain foods and an emphasis on moderation.
The culinary treatises provide insights into the interconnection of food, culture, and religion in the medieval Islamic world, showing how culinary practices were influenced by trade, geography, and religious teachings, whereas the emphasis on gustatory sensation, health, and etiquette reflects the rich cultural heritage and the significant role food played in the social and religious fabric of medieval Islamic societies.
Article
Identity, Ideology, and the Language of Food
Cynthia Gordon and Alla Tovares
Linguistic and discourse analytic studies of food-related communication demonstrate how people construct identities and (re)create and contest ideologies that focus on food but extend well beyond it to issues of socioeconomic class, culture, gender, and privilege. Scholarship in this area considers how people engage in food-related communication across contexts, including in mealtime conversations, on restaurant menus and food packaging, in recipes, on social media, and as represented on infotainment food television. Analyzing the details of human interaction and texts also illuminates the role of specific linguistic and other communicative strategies—such as use of adjectives and metaphors—in constituting the food-related discourse that helps constitute human experience.
Article
Indigenous Foodways among Native Americans
Christina Gish Hill
Native peoples of North America have developed foodways over centuries of living in relationships with particular landscapes. These foods have emerged from detailed knowledge of the landscape gained through careful observation over the generations. This knowledge includes maintaining a sustainable relationship with the environment to ensure consistent food sources in some unforgiving landscapes. The advent of contact with European settlers in North America and the eventual insertion of Native peoples into a global capitalist economy dramatically affected Indigenous people’s relationship with the environment, impacting access to food using precontact mechanisms. Colonization of Indigenous peoples throughout North America altered their access to healthy, culturally appropriate foods in many ways, leading to severely degraded health in Native communities. Beginning in the early 21st century, Indigenous people throughout North America began to reclaim and rejuvenate precontact foodways in a quest to repair physical and emotional well-being, connect more deeply with ceremony, reanimate local economies, heal damaged environments, and ultimately work toward food sovereignty.
Article
Racism and Restaurant Tipping in the United States
Saru Jayaraman
The subminimum wage for tipped workers—a legacy of slavery and still only $2.13 an hour federally as of 2024—has always been a source of poverty, racial inequity, and sexual harassment for six million tipped workers and 13.6 million restaurant workers nationwide. Tipped workers of color earn less than White tipped workers due to implicit customer bias and occupational segregation of workers of color into more casual, lower-tipping establishments.
With the COVID pandemic, racial inequity, harassment, and economic instability for workers of color grew and resulted in differential experiences for workers of color when they were asked to enforce COVID protocols during the pandemic and when they returned to work as tipped workers postpandemic. As a result of these worsened experiences, 1.2 million workers left the restaurant industry during and after the pandemic, creating the most acute staffing crisis in the history of the US restaurant industry according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
As a result of this moment of worker power, thousands of restaurants have voluntarily sought to end this legacy of slavery, and there is more momentum than ever for policy to end the subminimum wage for tipped workers in multiple states nationwide. One Fair Wage, the organization the author leads, is at the forefront of these policy changes. Though there are historical and ongoing racial inequities that emanate from the current wage structure for tipped workers, 2024 also represents an incredibly hopeful moment of transformation in the marketplace and in the policy arena in dozens of states.
