The locavore's dilemma

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Sarah Murray

In her book, Sarah Murray has toured the globe in search of the stories behind food miles. Along the way, she has collected a series of astonishing facts and vivid accounts of Shanghai cafes serving English tea from Harrogate, American grain falling from a United Nations plane in Sudan and Memphis barbequed ribs flying FedEx to Wall Street traders. And such journeys date back millennia, from Roman olive oil to the Eastern spice trade. Moveable Feasts brings historical perspective to a subject that has grabbed the headlines, illustrating food's crucial role in shaping global politics, taste and culture. Murray shows how the well-travelled dinner is an inevitable consequence of man's quest for sustenance and argues that globetrotting food was a reality long before the term 'food miles' was coined.

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Patrick Martins with Mike Edison

We have evolved as meat eaters, proclaims Patrick Martins, and it's futile to deny it. But, given the destructive forces of the fast-food industry and factory farming, we need to make smart, informed choices about the food we eat and where it comes from. In 50 short chapters, Martins cuts through organized zealotry and the misleading jargon of food labeling to outline realistic steps everyone can take to be part of the sustainable-food movement. With wit, and insight, and no small amount of provocation, The Carnivore's Manifesto is both a revolutionary call to arms and a rollicking good read that will inspire, engage, and challenge anyone interested in the way we eat today.

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L.A. Clarkson and E. Margaret Crawford

This text traces the history of food and famine in Ireland. The authors explore the economic and social forces which have lain behind changes in diet, as well as the more personal motives of taste, preference, and nutrition.

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Psyche Williams Forson, Carole Counihan

"The field of food studies has been growing rapidly over the last thirty years and has exploded since the turn of the century. Scholars from an array of disciplines have trained fresh theoretical and methodological approaches onto new dimensions of the human relationship to food. This anthology capitalizes on this particular cultural moment to bring to the fore recent scholarship from some new and established voices and that have been pushing the limits of the field into ever more fascinating and innovative directions. Taking Food Public is organized into five interrelated sections: food production, consumption, performance, diasporas, and activism. The articles in this reader aim to provide new perspectives on the changing meanings and uses of food in the twenty-first century.This book integrates understandings of race, class, gender, region, sexuality and ethnic/national identity into the human experience of food. Taking Food Public also examines how this experience is manifested in extraordinary forms of food production and consumption (in mass media performances of cooking and eating, redefinitions of foodways throughout Diasporas, identities around food, and in food activism).Most important, this bewildering array of new academic insights into food and culture as well as the wealth of new food trends and food issues around the world cries out for original ways to frame, organize, and help teach these new developments. Here are the right Editors to help write original, teachable, foundational essays and otherwise organize this disparate, exciting new material into a coherent whole"--