Food, the Body and the Self | 0:e upplagan

Food and eating practices are at the centre of the new concern in Western societies about the body, self-control, health, risk, consumption and identity. While individuals enter the world with the need to eat to survive, from the moment of birth their responses to food and eating practices are shaped by the way in which they interact with others and with cultural artefacts. As such, the meanings, discourses and practices around food and eating are worthy of detailed analysis and interpretation.

In an exciting, wide-ranging and thought-provoking analysis of the sociocultural and personal meanings of food and eating, Deborah Lupton explores the relationship between food and embodiment, the emotions and subjectivity. In doing so, she includes discussion of the intertwining of food, meaning and culture in the context of childhood and the family, as well as the social construction of foodstuffs as gendered. Other areas considered include food tastes, dislikes and preferences, the dining-out experience, spirituality and the `civilized' body. She draws on a diverse range of sources, including representations of food and eating in film, literature, advertising, gourmet magazines, news reports and public health literature, as well as her own empirical research relating to the meanings of food in everyday life.