San Antonio College Library

Comfort Food explores this concept with examples taken from Atlantic Canadians, Indonesians, the English in Britain, and various ethnic, regional, and religious populations as well as rural and urban residents in the United States. This volume includes studies of particular edibles and the ways in which they comfort or in some instances cause discomfort. The contributors focus on items ranging from bologna to chocolate, including sweet and savory...

"Over the years, Boston has been one of America's leading laboratories of urban culture, including restaurants, and Boston history provides valuable insights into American food ways. James C. O'Connell, in this fascinating look at more than two centuries of culinary trends in Boston restaurants, presents a rich and hitherto unexplored side to the city's past. Dining Out in Boston shows that the city was a pioneer in elaborate hotel dining, oyster...

"Aztec painted manuscripts and sculptural works, as well as indigenous and Spanish sixteenth-century texts, were filled with images of foodstuffs and food processing and consumption. Both gods and humans were depicted feasting, and food and eating clearly played a pervasive, integral role in Aztec rituals. Basic foods were transformed into sacred elements within particular rituals, while food in turn gave meaning to the ritual performance. This pioneering...

The table is set for an exploration of 21st century eating habits, and the first thing we learn is that there's trouble stewing. Almost everywhere on earth, eating habits have nose-dived. The simple sustaining ritual of making and sharing food is disappearing. Traditional diets that are more nutritious and ideal for fighting heart disease are on the decline everywhere. This program follows the downturn in home cooking and examines the arrival of food...

"The creation of the Aunt Jemima trademark from an 1889 vaudeville performance of a play called "The Emigrant" helped codify a pervasive connection between African American women and food. In Black Hunger, Doris Witt demonstrates how this connection has operated as a central structuring dynamic of twentieth-century U.S. psychic, cultural, sociopolitical, and economic life." "Witt draws on recent work in social history and cultural studies to argue...

Examines the social, psychological, and spiritual consequences of food choices, looks at food as the link between humans, the natural order, and cultural heritage, and argues that war, terrorism, genocide, disease, environmental degradation, and other problems affecting the world are a direct result of an unwillingness by people to make the connections between what they eat and how it got on their plates.

The book provides a thorough account of the role that food plays in the lives of today's youth, teasing out the many contradictions of food as a cultural object, fast food portrayed as a necessity for the poor and yet, reviled by upper-middle class parents; fast food restaurants as one of the few spaces that kids can claim and effectively 'take over' for several hours each day; food corporations spending millions each year to market their food to...

"The autobiography the Food Network would write if it could write one--a candid, behind-the-scenes look at how one network launched one of the biggest cultural waves of the last 20 years"-- "Big personalities, high drama--the extraordinary behind-the-scenes story of the Food Network, now about to celebrate its twentieth anniversary: the business, media, and cultural juggernaut that changed the way America thinks about food. In October 1993, a tiny...

Provides understanding of the role of food in the contemporary world. The authors explore both the empirical questions raised by the relation of food to inequality, scarcity and famine, and the broader theoretical issue of food as a fundamental item of consumption and cultural symbol.