Eating as Practice: Consumption Between Agency and Predictable Performance

By Irina D. Mihalache

Alan Warde. The Practice of Eating. Polity Press, 2016. 203 pp.

In cultural studies and media studies, the question of consumer agency continues to be contested with respect to the role played by context (cultural, political, social, economic, etc.), identity (gender, race, ethnicity, class, etc.), media (institutions and content), and material culture (technology, environment, food, fashion, etc.). 
» Read the rest

Eat and Be Eaten: The Gastropolitics of the (Post) Colony

By Julietta Singh

Parama Roy.  Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial.  Duke University Press, 2010.  277 pp.

If ever a work took seriously Jacques Derrida’s insistence that we must understand eating as an act through which we both consume and are consumed, it is Parama Roy’s remarkable new book, Alimentary Tracts.
» Read the rest