Why We Eat, How We Eat maps new terrains in thinking about relations between bodies and foods. With the central premise that food is both symbolic and material, the volume explores the intersections of current critical debates regarding how individuals eat and why they eat. Through a wide-ranging series of case studies it examines how foods and bodies both haphazardly encounter, and actively engage with, one another in ways that are simultaneously material, social, and political. The aim and uniqueness of this volume is therefore the creation of a multidisciplinary dialogue through which to produce new understandings of these encounters that may be invisible to more established paradigms. In so doing, Why We Eat, How We Eat concomitantly employs eating as a tool - a novel way of looking - while also drawing attention to the term 'eating' itself, and to the multiple ways in which it can be constituted. The volume asks what eating is - what it performs and silences, what it produces and destroys, and what it makes present and absent. It thereby traces the webs of relations and multiple scales in which eating bodies are entangled; in diverse and innovative ways, contributors demonstrate that eating draws into relationships people, places and objects that may never tangibly meet, and show how these relations are made and unmade with every mouthful. By illuminating these contemporary encounters, Why We Eat, How We Eat offers an empirically grounded richness that extends previous approaches to foods and bodies.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Introduction: contours of eating: mapping the terrain of body/food encounters, Emma-Jayne Abbots and Anna Lavis; Part I Absences and Presences: How We (Do Not) Eat What (We Think) We Eat: Invisible foodscapes: into the blue, Kaori O’Connor; The substance of absence: exploring eating and anorexia, Anna Lavis; Home and heart, hand and eye: unseen links between pigmen and pigs in industrial farming, Kim Baker; Interlude: Eating practices and health behaviour, Simon Cohn. Part II Intimacies, Estrangements and Ambivalences: How Eating Comforts and Disquiets: Advancing critical dietetics: theorizing health at every size, Lucy Aphramor, Jennifer Brady and Jacqui Gingras; Eating and drinking kefraya: the karam in the vineyards, Elizabeth Saleh; Negotiating foreign bodies: migration, trust and the risky business of eating in highland Ecuador, Emma-Jayne Abbots; Interlude: Reflections on fraught food, Jon Holtzman. Part III Contradictions and Co-Existences: What We Should and Should Not Eat: Chewing on choice, Sally Brooks, Duika Burges Watson, Alizon Draper, Michael Goodman, Heidi Kvalvaag and Wendy Wills; `It is the bacillus that makes our milk’: ethnocentric perceptions of yogurt in postsocialist Bulgaria, Maria Yatova; The transition to low carbon milk: dairy consumption and the changing politics of human-animal relations, Jim Ormond; Interlude: Reflections on the elusiveness of eating, Anne Murcott. Part IV Entanglements and Mobilizations: The Multiple Sites of Eating Encounters: Confessions of a vegan anthropologist: exploring the trans-biopolitics of eating in the field, Samantha Hurn; Metabolism as strategy: agency, evolution and biological hinterlands, Rachael Kendrick; Ingesting places: embodied geographies of coffee, Benjamin Coles; Complex carbohydrates: on the relevance of ethnography in nutrition education, Emily Yates-Doerr; Interlude: Entanglements: fish, guts, and bio-cultural sustainability, Elspeth Probyn; Index.