Taking Food Public: Redefining Foodways in a Changing World ed. by Psyche Williams-Forson, Carole Counihan (review)

Companion website: www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415888554

Taking Food Public is a thick volume packed with a broad selection of interdisciplinary approaches to five specific topics related to worldwide food studies. This book has brought together a fine grouping of writers representing anthropology, sociology, geography, nutrition, gender studies, labor studies, media studies, environmental science and landscape architecture, to name only a few. The authors address topics that center on issues related to production, consumption, performance, food in the diaspora, and activism and foodways.

As folklorists, we often reach out to other scholarly areas to support our analysis in terms of traditional expressive culture. The very wide approach offered in Taking Food Public brings many voices together at this table. The global reach from Cuba to Venezuela and Peru to Southeast Asia and to the UK as well as to African Americans and Jewish homes in the American South address an equally broad reach of topics as varied as organic farming, veganism, agro-business, fast food, dumpster diving, and changes in traditional food and eating patterns. The role of women as food providers and agents of change is explored by several authors.

The seven authors in the first section, “Re-thinking Production,” explore different sectors from which people obtain their food. Articles address the role of corporations and agro-business and small-scale suppliers as well as urban gardens and foragers. The role of Mexican women cooking in their own businesses, in public kitchens, is the focus of one article. Meredith Abarca uses culinary chats, charlas, to delve into these women’s food endeavors.

Food consumption from the point of view of race and socio-economic standing is the subject of the following seven articles. Julie Guthman’s contribution about the nature of users of farmers’ markets and community-supported agriculture (CSA) buying clubs was of particular interest to me. I host our synagogue’s CSA and have often wondered about the economic choices made by subscribers. Other pieces in this section address topics ranging from habits of black New Yorkers to low-income homes in upstate New York to dumpster diving among Australian youth.

The interdisciplinary nature of food studies is especially reflected in sections 3 and 4—“Performing Food Cultures” and “Food Diasporas: Taking Food Global.” In the former, literature and film are mined to analyze different aspects of male-female behaviors and relationships in Asia and the diaspora. Gender identity as expressed through food practices is another theme that emerges here. The movements of peoples in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are the overall focus of articles in the diaspora section. Food, here, is explored as an important identity marker. Globalization again is served up by several authors as formerly regional foods find their way to the market, home, and table.

While all of the articles are of interest and present different ways of approaching aspects of this vast topic, of particular interest to folk-lorists might be Marcie Cohen Ferris’s piece on Southern food traditions that have taken root in the very small Jewish communities of the Mississippi Delta. Hers is an intensely personal contribution about a complex lifestyle or life-ways of which food is a part.

The ten articles in the fifth section of the book look at activism; the authors here consider how individual and collective efforts can change the ways in which food is produced, distributed, and consumed. Questions explored include topics such as Rebecca Sims’s study of authenticity of food provided for tourists in Great Britain’s Lake District, and Kathleen Schroeder’s look at the role of community kitchens to both empower and oppress women in Latin America. It’s interesting how with such a large collections of very interesting pieces, there is crossover between the book’s sections; here, Lisa Markowitz looks at farmers’ markets from the point of view of low-income communities and how Counihan’s photo-essay...