FYS: Food For Thought (Tombasco): Getting Started

Available as an ebook. The 1983 version is available in print at Irwin Library.
Includes biographical profiles of authors and summaries of key American works.

Five volume set is available in the Reference section of Irwin Library.
"Contains profiles of three hundred notable literary works written from ancient times through the end of the twentieth century, relating them to the historical context in which they were written and in which they are set."

Available as an ebook. Three volume set is available in print at Irwin Library."
This Dartmouth Medal--winning 3-volume set provides integrated information to encourage a greater appreciation of food, its history, and its ethnic diversity, while also explaining its nutritional significance. By combining a wide range of perspectives---a collaborative effort of hundreds of specialists---this source provided answers to questions about health, food policy, hunger, food studies, and the food industry, while at the same time stimulating new insights about human evolution, adaptation, and creativity, and a richer appreciation of the many meanings of food and culture in our everyday lives. The Encyclopedia presents 600 articles on food and its place in human culture and society, covering everything from agronomy to zucchini."

Link leads to ebook version available with Butler University credentials.
Black Hunger focuses on debates over soul food since the 1960s to illuminate a complex web of political, economic, religious, sexual, and racial tensions between whites and blacks and within the black community itself. Doris Witt draws on vaudeville, literature, film, visual art, and cookbooks to explore how food has been used both to perpetuate and to challenge racial stereotypes.

Link leads to ebook version available with Butler University credentials.
Big Night (1996), Ratatouille (2007), and Julie and Julia (2009) are more than films about food;they serve a political purpose. In the kitchen, around the table, and in the dining room, these films use cooking and eating to explore such themes as ideological pluralism, ethnic and racial acceptance, gender equality, and class flexibility;but not as progressively as you might think. Feasting Our Eyes takes a second look at these and other modern American food films to emphasize their conventional approaches to nation, gender, race, sexuality, and social status.

Link leads to ebook version available with Butler University credentials.
"Raising concerns about health, the environment, and economic inequality, critics of the industrial food system insist that we are in crisis. In response, food justice activists based in marginalized, low-income communities of color across the United States have developed community-based solutions to the nation's food system problems, arguing that activities like urban agriculture, cultural nutrition education, and food-related social enterprises can be an integral part of systemic social change. Highlighting the work of Community Services Unlimited, a South Los Angeles food justice group founded by the Black Panther Party, More Than Just Food explores the possibilities and limitations of the community-based approach, offering a networked examination of the food justice movement in the age of the 'nonprofit industrial complex."

Link leads to ebook version available with Butler University credentials.
"A Taste of Power is an investigation of the crucial role culinary texts and practices played in the making of cultural identities and social hierarchies since the founding of the United States. Nutritional advice and representations of food and eating, including cookbooks, literature, magazines, newspapers, still life paintings, television shows, films, and the internet, have helped throughout American history to circulate normative claims about citizenship, gender performance, sexuality, class privilege, race, and ethnicity, while promising an increase in cultural capital and social mobility to those who comply with the prescribed norms. The study examines culinary writing and practices as forces for the production of social order and, at the same time, as points of cultural resistance against hegemonic norms, especially in shaping dominant ideas of nationalism, gender, and sexuality, suggesting that eating right is a gateway to becoming an American, a good citizen, an ideal man, or a perfect mother. Cookbooks, as a low-prestige literary form, became the largely unheralded vehicles for women to participate in nation-building before they had access to the vote or public office, for middle-class authors to assert their class privileges, for men to claim superiority over women even in the kitchen, and for Lesbian authors to reinscribe themselves into the heteronormative economy of culinary culture. The book engages in close reading of a wide variety of sources and genres to uncover the intersections of food, politics, and privilege in American culture."