Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture

By E.N. Anderson

Book Overview

Illuminates the ways that cultures and political systems structure the edible environment

Everyone eats, but rarely do we investigate why we eat what we eat. Why do we love spices, sweets, coffee? How did rice become such a staple food throughout so much of eastern Asia? Everyone Eats examines the social and cultural reasons for our food choices and provides an explanation of the nutritional reasons for why humans eat what they do, resulting in a unique cultural and biological approach to the topic. E. N. Anderson explains the economics of food in the globalization era; food's relationship to religion, medicine, and ethnicity; and offers suggestions on how to end hunger, starvation, and malnutrition.

This thoroughly updated Second Edition incorporates the latest food scholarship, most notably recognizing the impact of sustainable eating advocacy and the state of food security in the world today. Anderson also brings more insight than ever before into the historical and scientific underpinnings of our food customs, fleshing this out with fifteen new and original photographs from his own extensive fieldwork.

A perennial classic in the anthropology of food, Everyone Eats feeds our need to understand human ecology by explaining the ways that cultures and political systems structure the edible environment.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814760066
• ISBN13: 9780814760062
• Release Date: February 2014
• Publisher: New York University Press
• Length: 362 Pages
• Weight: 1.19 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Review on Book

Book was in excellent condition and exactly what was expected, and recieved in a timely manner.

Plenty of cultural insights and background history

There's a strong relationship between biological need and culture: a relationship emphasized by E.N. Anderson, professor of anthropology at University of California Riverside, in his survey Everyone Eats: Understanding Food And Culture. Discussions range from the aesthetics of eating and different sensory perceptions between cultures to the needs for foods as displayed in differing literature of cultures, and surveys of how food fads change over time. Plenty of cultural insights and background history lend to a survey particularly recommended for college-level students of anthropology and social science.