Corporate Concentration in the Food Industry
Steve Striffler
Food industry concentration, or the control of a relatively small number of corporations over the food system, has relatively deep historical origins, even if it has reached unprecedented ...
More
Edible Insects
Gina Louise Hunter
Insects have been an important part of the human diet from time immemorial. Although they are not a common food item in Western cultures, insects contribute to the traditional diets of many ...
More
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 ...
More
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 ...
More
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 ...
More
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 ...
More
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 ...
More
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 ...
More
Food as a Weapon
Ellen Messer and Marc J. Cohen
The use of food as a weapon is as old as written records. Siege, blockade, and starvation are well-documented military strategies, as are political strategies that use food as a tool to ...
More
Food Politics and Policy
Marion Nestle
The food industry is a vast conglomeration of national and international companies that produce, process, manufacture, sell, and serve foods, beverages, and dietary supplements. Together, ...
More
Gastrodiplomacy
Johanna Mendelson Forman
Gastrodiplomacy is a subset of public diplomacy that uses food as a means of persuading audiences about the power of cuisine to promote specific foreign policy goals. The term entered the ...
More
Grocery Stores and Supermarkets
Craig Upright
The modern grocery store is an institution that could not have existed in earlier time periods. Its creation required the development of reliable distribution systems, preservation ...
More
History of Food Advertising
Sarah Elvins
Food advertising offers an intriguing window into the cooking and eating habits of a society, is shaped by the culture in which it is produced, and plays a role in creating and reinforcing ...
More
History of the American School Lunch Program
Shayne Figueroa
School lunch programs in the United States reflect over one hundred years of public debate and policy involving nutrition, welfare, and agriculture. These programs originated in the late ...
More
The Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) and the Struggle for Agrarian Reform in Brazil
Wilder Robles
The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) is presently one of the largest, best organized, and most influential social movements in Latin ...
More
Latinx Immigrant Workers’ Challenges in the Rural US Food System
Diego Thompson
A large body of literature has shown immigrant workers in the US food system experience and deal with significant problems that are often worsened in rural areas. The state and the private ...
More
Low-Wage Labor in Distribution Sectors of the Food Economy
Jennifer Parker
Low-wage distribution workers are essential to the food economy. In a globalizing world, the distance between sites of production and consumption expands as firms search the world for more ...
More
Peasant Agroecology in Africa and Latin America
Boaventura Monjane and Peter M. Rosset
Agroecology is a word with multiple definitions. Some define it as a narrow set of technologies to make farming more sustainable, while in a broader sense it is multifaceted ...
More
Processed Foods
Garrett M. Broad
Traditional forms of food processing have deep roots in human evolutionary history and across ancient civilizations. Food-processing innovations that began in the 18th century played a key ...
More
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 ...
More