Food and Folklore Reader

Book excerpt: Folklore has long explored food as a core component of life, linked to identity, aesthetics, and community and connecting individuals to larger contexts of history, culture and power. It recognizes that we gather together to eat, define class, gender, and race by food production, preparation, and consumption, celebrate holidays and religious beliefs with food, attach meaning to the most mundane of foods, and evoke memories and emotions through our food selections and presentations. The Food and Folklore Reader is the first comprehensive introduction to folklore methods and concepts relevant to food, spanning the entire discipline with key sources drawn from around the globe. Whilst folklore approaches have long permeated food studies, this is the first dedicated reader to introduce those ideas and to encourage students of food to explore them in their own work. Internationally respected editor Lucy M. Long offers expert commentary and rich learning features to aid teaching. Definitive in scale and scope, the reader covers the history of food in folklore scholarship whilst also highlighting food studies approaches and concepts for folklore readers. From seminal works on identity and aesthetics to innovative scholarship on contemporary food issues such as culinary tourism and food security, this will be an essential resource for food studies, folklore studies and anthropology.