Food Nations

This original collection abandons culinary nostalgia and the cataloguing of regional cuisines to examine the role of food and food marketing in constructing culture, consumer behavior, and national identity.

"Food Nations is a book I can't wait to teach. The individual articles capture the centrality and complexity of the relationships between food, nationhood, markets, and the manipulation of cultural meaning within modernity." -- Judith Goode, Temple University"Food keeps scholars honest: clarity is right there on the palate, the plate, and the factory line, and nothing can illustrate better the power of identity, class, and the marketing of nationality better than a pickle, an avocado, a donut, or a tortilla. Food Nations treats foods as keys to personal, familial, community, and national identity. Reading the volume's elegant essays makes me hungry for more." -- Merry Issacs White, author of The Material Child"Until recently, American consumers have limited their concerns about food to additives and pesticides. But to be truly responsible and healthy consumers, they also need to know something about food business, politics, science, history, aesthetics, and traditions." -- Nancy Ralph, Director, New York Food Museum"Food studies is serious business and Food Nations is a major contribution to our understanding of the business of food. This meticulously researched book is a most welcome addition to an exciting new field." -- Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, author of Destination Culture"That food and drink are at the very center of the body politic is dramatically enforced in the revelatory collection of essays, unified by the proposition that food is power and power, food. If anyone can doubt that food is as serious a subject as politics or business, let him read any one of these essays and stay amazed." -- Betty Fussell, author of My Kitchen Wars"Food Nations is a cornucopia of fascinating information about why we eat what we eat. There is much in this wide-ranging book to stimulate anyone with an interest in the past, the present, and even the future of food." -- Harvey Levenstein, author of Revolution at the Table "Food Nations joins a growing body of scholarship that proves emphatically that food matters. . . .Food Nations should take a respected place in a sophisticated and complex literature about food, identity, society, and power." -- Hasia R. Diner, New York University, author of Hungering for America"If anyone can doubt that food is as serious a subject as politics or business, let him read any one of these essays and stand amazed." -- Betty Fussell, author TheStory of Corn and My Kitchen Wars

Warren Belasco is Professor of American Studies at University of Maryland and one of the leading scholars in food studies. He is the author of Appetite for Change:How the Counterculture Took on the FoodIndustry.Philip Scranton is the Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University and research director at the Hagley Museum and Library. He is the author or editor of six books, including EndlessNovelty: Specialty Production and AmericanIndustrialization.