Conversations with Food

 

Book Description: 

"Conversations With Food" offers readers an array of essays revealing the power of food (and its absence) to transform relationships between the human and non-human realms; to define national, colonial, and postcolonial cultures; to help instantiate race, gender, and class relations; and to serve as the basis for policymaking. Food functions in these contexts as items in religious or secular law, as objects with which to bargain or over which to fight, as literary trope, and as a way to improve or harm health-individual or collective. The anthology ranges from Ancient Greece to the posthuman fairy underworld; from the codifying of French culinary heritage to the strategic marketing of 100-calorie snacks; from the European famine after the Second World War to the lush and exotic cuisines of culinary tourism today. "Conversations With Food" will engage anyone interested in discovering the disciplinary breadth and depth of food studies. The anthology is ideally suited for introductory and advanced courses in food studies, as it includes essays in a range of humanities and social science disciplines, and each author draws cross-disciplinary linkages between their own work and other essays in the volume. This thematic and conceptual intercalation, when read with the editors' introduction, makes the collection an exceptionally strong representation of the field of food studies.

 

Author Bio:

Dorothy Chansky is a President's Excellence in Research Professor at TTU. She was Founding Director of Tech's Humanities Center and teaches on the History/Theory/Criticism track in the School of Theatre and Dance. She is a past President of the American Theatre and Drama Society and Vice President for Publications of the American Society for Theatre Research (2020-2022). She was inducted into membership in the College of Fellows of the American Theatre in 2020.

Dr. Chansky is the author of two books, Composing Ourselves: The Little Theatre Movement and the American Audience (Southern Illinois UP, 2004) and Kitchen Sink Realisms: Domestic Labor, Dining, and Drama on the American State (U of Iowa P, 2015), and co-editor of Food and Theatre on the World Stage (Routledge, 2015) as well as Conversations With Food (Vernon Press, 2020). Her book about representations of dementia on the American stage of the past hundred years will be published by Palgrave in 2023..